Chapter 11 #2
Targeted breeding wasn’t new. People had tried for champion racehorses for centuries and, for even longer, devotees had bred pit bulls and fighting cocks for strength and aggression.
In those cases, however, they were willing to discard hundreds of failures in the search for one champion.
A farmer needed a better success rate than that.
The book suggested scientific ways to increase the success rate.
He managed to fix his interest on the text and was startled when the key turned and she came in. He looked first at her face and hit the frustrating grotesquerie of her mask, so he quickly looked lower for hints about her mood.
Nervous, but not as awkward as the first time.
In the process he couldn’t help but notice that she was wearing her first low bodice, which made the magnificent best of her figure.
Hot desire hit like a lightning bolt.
Silk, he thought desperately, trying to keep control. Pink silk. Lace. Bows. Pretty. Feminine.
Not right for her.
Not for his mysterious lady.
She might be pretty, and she was certainly feminine, but she possessed more womanly strength than the gown suggested, and more character, too. He’d dress her in earthy colors. Subtle greens, warm browns, cream. Blackberry purple …
He was just sitting there. Putting the book aside, he rose to give her the honor of a full, courtly bow. “Welcome, mistress.”
She seemed frozen, too, and he wondered if she almost hadn’t come. Should he move between her and the door to prevent escape?
Then she jerked into movement, hurrying toward the candle. He caught her wrist as she passed. “It was daylight before.”
“It’s not daylight now.” Her tendons ran stiff beneath his fingers.
“Candlelight is very becoming.”
Her head tilted back as if she prayed. “I need,” she whispered, “darkness.”
Why had it been possible earlier in daylight, but not now? What had changed? He wanted very much to love her by candlelight, but he let her go, licked his finger and thumb, and pinched out the flame. “Now, mistress,” he asked in the dark, “what else do you command?”
With the lack of light, his other senses sparked. He fancied he could hear the rustle of her gown as she breathed. Certainly he could smell the flower perfume that would ever after be linked in his mind with this strange affair.
With her.
“Should I undress?” she whispered.
“It is as you desire.” Did his voice carry his bewildering tremor of raw desire?
What was he? A callow youth?
She moved suddenly, distressfully. “Tell me what to do.”
He spoke his need. “Surrender. Give up your command. Give it to me. Be my slave for the night.”
“Indentured servant,” she retorted. Perhaps she took a step away.
“Slave.”
His eyes were settling to the dark. He saw her turn her head, as if trying to study him. “What if you do something I don’t like?”
“Tell me. My aim will be your delight, I promise. Trust me.”
That, above all, he wanted. Her trust.
“Why should I?”
The cold question hurt. “That is for you to decide.”
She moved restlessly, over to the bed and back, skirts whispering of secrets and senses. “You won’t do anything … to distress me?”
“I can’t promise that. We have only a few hours in which to learn what distresses us and pleases us.
Quite likely we will never meet again.” He said it deliberately, and heard her stifled protest. “It seems a shame to spend our last night blandly. Though, if that is your wish, it shall be my command.”
She stood still, so perfectly still that he could detect neither rustle nor breath. Then she turned, and sank to her knees before him. “I am yours, then. Pleasure me as you will, my lord. Until dawn.”
My lord? He’d not told her of his title. But then he realized it was just part of the game. A synonym for master. A happy whimsy. It pleased him that she would use his true title throughout this special night.
He settled his hands on her warm, soft shoulders, slid them across satin skin, feeling her rapid pulse. No faster than his. As he circled her neck, tension set her muscles and she swallowed, but she remained acquiescent. He wasn’t sure he was breathing at all in this stunning, meaningless moment.
Then: “Welcome, slave,” he said, and took her hands to draw her up into his arms. He sat, settling her on his lap. His hand found the swell of her full breasts above her stiff corset.
If she were truly his, he’d command her to wear lower bodices. She had the figure for them. But then again, if she were his, he might want her beauty to be for him alone.
He was just holding her, his fingers exploring that discreet rise of flesh. With a bemused smile he realized that her total surrender had left him rather at a loss. What did he want to do with her?
Cherish her.
Forever.
Holding her closer, he rubbed his face gently in her silky hair. “I wish we had longer.”
“Why?”
“Then we could waste more time like this.”
She moved infinitesimally closer. “This doesn’t feel like a waste of time.”
“It doesn’t, does it?” With closeness, lust had simmered down for a while.
He moved his hand up, up to the tender skin of her nape, and the tangling tease of her hair, longing to kiss her.
He wouldn’t ask again that she remove the mask, for she clearly had her reasons.
Perhaps she was a stunning beauty, known far and wide. Perhaps she was scarred by the pox.
Neither mattered.
He breathed in her scent and, ignoring the bothersome strings of the mask, tested her ear with his tongue.
She sucked in a breath. He smiled, and teased her a little more, exploring the curves and ridges, and the softlobe. Then he sucked it.
Her hand clutched at his arm. He blew softly into her ear, a breath only, but he knew how it would sound to her, here in the dark, in the heat of their closeness.
“You can’t,” she said, unsteadily, “make love to an ear.”
“Never say can’t to a man on his mettle.” And he proceeded to make delicate love to her ear, only letting his hands take the smallest part—one playing in the wonders of her nape, the other wound with one of hers, sensing her growing tension.
She suddenly laughed, a gasping laugh. “Stop!”
He nipped her. “You surrendered, slave.”
“But please. I want more.”
So he raised her hand, and freeing it from his tangling fingers, made love to it, to each separate finger in turn. He suckled and stroked each in his mouth, then moved between the smoothness of the back, and the hot sensitivity of the heart of her palm.
He nipped the pad at the base of her thumb. “I have a complaint.”
She tensed. “What?”
“There was no blackberry pie for dinner.”
She melted into laughter. “Oh, I’m sorry. Jessie mustn’t have had time.”
“You need more servants, mysterious lady.”
“At this moment, I need only you.”
His body betrayed him with a tremble. His already hardened penis responded. This couldn’t go on much longer—
Well, why not?
Sitting up straighter, he eased her astride him. She tensed a little. Doubtless she’d never done it this way before. Hell, she’d doubtless never done it except passively under her thrusting, loutish, elderly husband.
He hoped that was true. If he could have nothing else, he wanted her senses, her heated memories, her secret dreams, to all be of him.
As casually and slowly as possible in his increasingly desperate state, he arranged her skirts so none of them came between her nakedness and him.
“What are you—”
“Hush, slave.”
She went silent, but remained anxiously rigid.
Adjusting his own position, he spread his legs, spreading hers. Her hands braced against his chest, as if she might at any moment push away from him. He captured them, placing them on his shoulders. “No,” he said.
Then, without getting up, he struggled out of his coat. His cravat followed, then his shirt, tugged out of his breeches and up over his head as she bounced and slid with his movements, driving him even wilder. Then he put her hands on his bare shoulders and almost melted at the sweetness of it.
After a moment, her hands moved, sliding slowly along his shoulders to the curve of his arms, then back to his neck to circle—or half circle—it in imitation of his earlier action.
Her thumbs rubbed up and down the front of his throat, and she must surely feel it when he swallowed, feel his desperate pulse.
Then her hands slid behind, to his nape. He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed, in danger of coming just from that innocent, devastating touch.
Her naked heat was so close, so ready! He managed to stay still as she sensed him with her fingers. Then she leaned forward—unaware, he was sure, of how her movement almost destroyed him—and put her face to the base of his neck.
Now he braced to push away, unable to bear the thought of a kiss from the mask. He felt only her tongue. Carefully keeping the mask from contact with him, she was cherishing his skin with her wet tongue.
Control broke. Thrusting his hands under the silk and lace of her skirts, he freed himself. Then, groaning with relief, he guided himself into her hot, creamy folds, fighting to go slowly, then losing, all his awareness there, and there alone.
When her hands clutched his hair, he’d forgotten he even had a head.
She moved as if to take him greedily farther into herself, as if to move around him.
He pushed into her, deep into her, into the flaming clutch of her.
He groaned something. He hoped it was flattering, because he meant it to be—she was bloody perfect, and she was giving him perfect pleasure—but at the moment she was only that.
His pleasure. He took and took, holding her hips to use her, until he dissolved into her and she into him, snared to him by his arms, her hair sticky in his questing mouth.
Dammit, but he wanted to kiss her!
He dragged back her head, wrenched up the bottom of her mask—something ripped—and put his mouth to hers. She cried out, struggling, but he kissed her anyway, claimed his right to kiss his woman, and after a moment she surrendered.
Bliss.
He drew back at last, feeling himself slip out of her below, sated, dissolved, complete. “I tell you true, sweet lady, I will always recognize you if we chance to kiss.”
She fumbled, and he knew she was pulling her silly mask back into place. “That’s safe enough, then,” she snapped. “I don’t go around kissing strange gentlemen.”
“I’m no stranger to you. Not anymore.”
He’d broken the rules, however, so he seized her skirts in case she tried to run.
All she said was, “Promise you won’t do that again.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
“Yes.”
He groaned at her wonderful honesty, pulling her into his arms. “Then why not? Why? What point to a mask in the dark?”
“I have my reasons. You must promise.”
“But you are my slave. You surrendered.”
“Not to that.”
“To everything.”
“No.” She tried to move and found she couldn’t. “Don’t …” she whispered. “Don’t spoil this.”
He wanted to insist, to truly master her to his will. He thought he could. Despite that, he knew he couldn’t. “Tell me why you must wear the mask.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s dark. I can’t see you. Blindfold me, if you want!”
“It’s not that. Stop this! If you don’t, I’ll have to go.”
He froze the angry words that burned at his lips. “But you don’t object to kisses?”
“Not as such.”
“Then tell me how I can kiss you. I need to kiss you.”
She lay against him, her breathing as fractured as his. After a silence he made himself not break, she said, “Let me go, and I’ll try to fix the mask.”
He wanted to argue further, but this clearly was her limit. Much as he hated to, he helped her to stand, then listened as she left the room.
She might not return.
What did it mean when a man risked a night of luscious sex for the chance of an honest kiss?
He sat and sank his head in his hands, hardly able to believe all this. He’d never had a taste for overwrought drama.
He didn’t have a taste for it now.
He was sunk in a genuine tragedy.
He believed this magic between them would have sprung up no matter where they’d met. If fate had been kind, it would have been at an assembly, a tea party, or even a country fair. He could have wooed and won her in the proper manner.
Instead, they had this. Masks, drama, and tormenting secrets in the night.