Chapter 13
Isadore awoke with a start. She had no idea when she'd finally dropped off to sleep.
After supper Ban had persuaded her to go to bed and try to rest. As if that would happen after what he'd told her about Horace Sutton.
Her heart began to race again at the mere thought of what might happen to Jeremy at the hands of such monstrous men as Sutton and her insidious bother-in-law.
She got out of bed and padded barefoot across the thick carpets to stir the ebbing fire back to life.
In the faint firelight she read the mantel clock.
Two o'clock in the morning. Her thin, muslin night rail clung to her skin.
In an effort to calm herself she turned her thoughts to Ban and the promises he'd made her as he'd held her in his arms.
What sort of woman had she become that the only place she felt safe was in the arms of a crime lord, a notorious thief, a man who took a life as easily as some men took a drink?
There was more, however, much more. Fourteen years a wife and in all that time she'd never experienced the sort of ecstasy this crude man of the streets had given her.
She left the bedchamber and crept into his study.
Immediately the air in the room filled her senses.
Her body began to heat as the scent of leather, gunpowder, and Ban's cedar and bergamot soap surrounded her.
For a man who had grown up in the gutters of the rookeries, he bathed often, more often than many gentlemen of her acquaintance.
Daisy had explained that all of the Dyer brothers had odd obsessions with the things they were never allowed as children.
Connor Dyer insisted on clean linens on his bed every day and had a tremendous library in his lair.
Fam Dyer had to have food within reach at all times.
Warrick Dyer, pressed into the Royal Navy as a mere child, never went anywhere without his boarding axe.
And Ban had to be clean at all times and never slept indoors, both as a result of being left in a mass grave with rotting corpses to die.
Everyone had their own hell to walk through and survive.
She didn't want that for Jeremy. A series of cold shivers raced through her.
Thoughts pushed their way into her head one after the other until nothing made sense.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to find George Fitz-Wilton and beat him until he told her where he'd hidden her son.
One tear and then another dripped across her cheek and dropped from her chin.
A gust of thick night wind pushed one of the double balcony doors open wide.
Her heart and mind had no inkling of what she needed in this moment.
God help her, her body did. Her skin tingled against the brush of the muslin fabric covering her.
She stepped slowly and lightly to the entrance to the balcony.
None of the curtains had been drawn around the bed, a sign Ban was having an equally maddening night.
She reached the foot of the bed and gazed up the wide mattress to find him propped up against a mountain of pillows staring out into the night.
His bare chest held the sheen of polished alabaster in the moonlight.
One leg was bent and angled out from under the counterpane, which barely covered his groin and other leg.
His hands were clasped behind his head. When he turned his head and saw her, her mouth went dry.
Their gazes locked and her every nerve vibrated and rattled down to her bones.
"I...I need you," she said hoarsely before she even realized she'd spoken.
He flipped the counterpane aside to reveal his cock, hard and ready. He wrapped his hand around himself and stroked, once and then again. "I'm yours, Isadore, for whatever you need." His voice was rough and edged with dark desire.
She was becoming a woman she did not recognize, and she did not care.
She drew her night rail over her head and dropped it at her feet.
He watched her walk slowly around the bed, his eyes raking her naked body so fiercely she could almost feel his hands on her.
As soon as she climbed onto the bed and knelt beside him, he dragged her to him and plundered her mouth in a hot, wet kiss.
He cupped the back of her head with one hand and palmed her breast with the other.
She reached down and wrapped her fingers around his thick cock.
He groaned into her mouth, and a shudder went through him.
She liked that. She reveled in drawing groans and urgent movements from this powerful man.
When she thrust her tongue into his mouth and took control of the kiss, she also increased the speed and depth of her strokes.
He took his hand from her head and caressed both breasts, brushing and pinching both nipples until they ached.
Suddenly, he broke the kiss and bent to take one nipple into his mouth, drawing and sucking until she cried out.
Isadore threw her leg across his and straddled him.
She drew back. He released her breast with a last flick of his tongue.
She kissed his wounded shoulder, then moved down to press kiss after kiss to the knife cut.
As she kissed and licked her way down his body, she discovered more scars and each one caused a pang to cross her heart.
She slid down his legs until she lay sprawled across him, her mouth poised over his cock.
With quick darts of her tongue, she teased him.
He flinched and gave a little gasp each time.
By the time she took him into her mouth he was a swearing, groaning, gasping creature, and Isadore loved each sound and move he made. She used her mouth and hand to bring him to the edge and then back down. She was wicked and frenzied and marveled at how beautiful and powerful she felt.
Suddenly, Ban gripped her elbows and pulled her back up his body. He raised her onto her knees over his cock. "Damn you, woman," he growled. "If you don't fuck me right now, I'm going to expire on the spot."
"You're no good to me dead," she murmured, as he held his cock in place with one hand whilst she lowered herself slowly onto him.
Once he was fully inside her, she threw her head back and tried her best to breathe.
She committed every sensation to memory.
Nothing had prepared her for the feeling that came from joining with Ban Dyer completely.
He wrapped his hands around her arse and squeezed as he lifted her slowly.
She settled onto her knees and fell into the rhythm he set as he raised and lowered her, groaning at every delicious slide of his cock into her body.
Soon, a sort of urgency overtook her. She braced her hands on his shoulders and changed the angle of her cunny against his hard body as she rode his cock faster and harder.
He lowered his head and took her breast into this mouth, sucking and biting to the point she feared she'd wake the entire Devil's Den with her sharp cries.
Soon he was pumping his hips in a rhythm to match hers.
The air was filled with the sounds of their bodies meeting and her voice as she gasped and begged wordlessly for a place and point that seemed more important than life itself.
In a flash of pleasure and pain, her vision was flooded with bursts of light and she lost complete control of her limbs.
Instinct took over until she rode to the point she could no longer move, and she collapsed on top of Ban as he called her name and flooded her with the searing liquid heat she'd drawn from his body.
They lay together--gasping, hot and limp, unable to move. Ban dragged the counterpane over them. When she started to move off of him, He held her in place.
"Stay," he said softly.
"I'm crushing you."
"Not yet,' he replied. He'd said those two words to her before, after their first kiss.
Somehow, she suspected he meant more by them than she was meant to know.
For the first time, she truly began to wonder how he felt about her and how she felt about him.
She wasn't being fair. She had Jeremy to think of.
No matter how she and Ban felt about each other, they could never be together.
They were from two different worlds, and neither of them would fit in the other's.
"Ban, I--"
"No serious conversation, Isadore. Not now. We've had enough serious talk today, don't you think?"
"I simply don't want you to think I'm using you...to find my son and for...this."
He laughed and she loved the way his chest rumbled beneath her cheek.
"I've been used for worse than this, love. Much worse. Whatever you're using me for is my choice now, not someone else's. Understood?"
She didn't know what to say, because she did understand. Which only made matters worse. His breath grew even, and in moments he was asleep. She, however, stayed awake in his arms until the sky began to turn the faintest shade of pre-dawn grey.
Seated in Con's opulent, private library, Ban found it difficult to concentrate on what Stephen Forsythe was saying.
His attention kept straying to Isadore who sat on the other side of the library table next to the handsome, well-dressed barrister, attending on the man's every word.
Ban knew Forsythe was happily married, but that was beside the point.
He'd become increasingly territorial about Isadore, and he hated it.
"Forsythe, can you explain all of this in the King's English so we ruffians can understand?" he finally asked. Which, of course, drew the attention of all three of his brothers and the bloody gentleman of the courts.
Isadore simply smiled and shook her head. "That would be easier, Mister Dyer, if you spoke the King's English. St. Giles Greek is not used a great deal on legal documents," she said.