Chapter 17
Nate’s blood thrummed through his body, urging him past the precipice of something he doubted Isobel fully comprehended.
He understood it all too well because he’d seen it after combat and in its very worst forms of excess after the Siege of Badajoz.
Dangerous situations could arouse primal appetites afterwards, postbattle savagery.
Living on the margins of death and solitude for years fundamentally changed a man. Not for the better; he’d lost his finer sensibilities over the years. He might at one point have tried to check baser instincts towards Isobel, but the gentle boy he’d been was well and truly gone.
And it wasn’t only danger that had him roused. Both of them.
Did she understand the nuance? He doubted it, and he wanted her an equal participant, fully consenting to whatever ensued, for her sake and his.
He removed his gloves and shrugged out of his coat with slow deliberation. Her eyes never left his face as he slowly began to close the distance between them.
“I want you. Very much. But if we have one another tonight, it won’t be gentle. I have little tenderness in me right now.”
Her breath caught audibly and shallowed as she apprehended his meaning.
“The decision is yours.” He was nearly to her now. “If that is not what you want, it will not happen at all.”
A slight negative shake of her head. “I do not need tenderness.” Her laugh was more breath than sound. “Perhaps I don’t want it either.” She reached out to curl fingers around his upper arm, face lifting towards his. “But I want you.”
A bolt of lightning, those words, electrifying his every cell. Thank Christ. She knew her own mind tonight. He hoped she would have no cause for regret tomorrow.
Her bare arm was silky between glove and gown. “I have command enough of myself to stop,” he rasped, “if at any time you tell me so.”
“I will not.”
The blood left his head at that, his hand on her arm tightening.
There was no preamble; the kiss was open-mouthed from the start.
Their clothes came off quickly, his tongue in her mouth for the entirety of it, portent and promise.
His hands and hers seized hold of one another’s curves and angles, slid everywhere and gripped hard enough to hurt, to bruise.
Took decisive possession of one another.
Lungs too heavy for air, he backed her, naked, into the door, her shoulders hitting audibly. Dizzy now with wanting to claim her, to refute contrived falsehoods and find the most elemental truth that could pass between two people: absolute dominance and utter surrender.
This, this, was real. Her nails scraping his back, bright lines of pain, when he bit her lip. Her moan when his teeth found the skin over her collarbone. His answering gasp at the pressure just short of pain—the roughness his mood demanded—when she closed a hand around his cock, stroking him hard.
She hooked an ankle behind his knee, climbing him a little.
Not here. The bed. He wasn’t quite so far gone as to take her here—to fuck her hard against the door, however willing she was. He took her by the shoulders, panting, turning her. “I want you. Now.”
Surely every drop of blood in his body was in his cock now. He stroked a hand roughly up his length as he followed her.
She lay on her back on the bed, drawing her knees apart, and he loomed above her, reaching a hand to tangle fingers through the curls between her legs.
Despite what he’d insinuated, he had the hazy plan of giving her release first, only because once he was inside her, his own appetite would drive him hard.
She dug her nails into his wrist, sighing, as he slid first one, then a second finger into her wetness, thumb stroking her just above.
She was slick, already clenching around him.
It came in flashes: her hands, ungentle on his face to bring his lips to hers.
Her tongue, demanding an answer.
Her fingers, gripping his cock.
Her words, his own given back: “I want you now.”
He held himself above her, nipping at her lips, tracing them with his tongue to savor the last dregs of heady anticipation as she guided him home. She gasped as he seated himself fully.
Slowly, deep as he could go. Holding deep until his lungs screamed for air. Again. Again.
Harder now, each stroke rocking her body backwards. She caught the rhythm, met each thrust.
They’d both be bruised. He didn’t care.
He caught her by the thighs, urging her legs higher. She crossed her ankles behind his back as her hands on his rear urged him closer still. Faster, harder, those fingers said. He obliged.
Already his climax was roaring down on him, but she was restless and twisting under him, chasing her own release, not quite there.
“I need . . .” she managed. And then, “Please.”
He withdrew completely. “Turn on your front.”
He caged her body with his own, guiding her onto forearms and knees, her cheek against the pillow. Hands on her rib cage, he steadied her and reentered on a single hard stroke. She shuddered as the force of it pushed her forward.
Christ. Only an iron will kept him from spilling in her.
“Again,” she said breathlessly.
Another thrust like that and he’d go over the edge without her. He rested his weight on her to roll her nipples between thumb and second finger. Her body was drawn tight as a bowstring, breath soughing from her. He rocked against her without withdrawing.
“Help me,” he said roughly. He laced his hand through her own, guiding her to touch herself until she contracted with each pass of their fingers. Her breath grew more ragged yet, but he could barely hear it over his own. She pushed backwards against him in thwarted need.
He swore aloud; he wasn’t going to last. He thrust again. Again.
She sobbed out a breath.
Again. He couldn’t delay his crisis much longer; it was bearing down on him inexorably, a white haze that blinded him.
Again. Again.
Nothing in the world but the slap of flesh and her wet warmth. No finesse now. He gritted his teeth as her body shook beneath him, and then— Thank Christ. She arched backwards against him, her body spasming around him as she cried out.
As she went limp beneath him, he gripped both breasts, anchoring to her. One, two, three shallow thrusts, her body squeezing his cock, and his own climax tore through him.
He rested his forehead against her back, gulping oxygen.
Her ribs communicated her own desperate need for air.
She made no move to retreat. Both their frames were trembling still, the aftermath of frenzy and hurtling from the cliffs against which they’d dashed themselves. He endeavored to steady his breath.
He was still half hard, still buried in her. He hadn’t withdrawn. Hadn’t even tried.
Careless. Reckless. Selfish. His mind tried to prompt him along those lines.
He didn’t have it within him to castigate himself.
No going back. No going back from the moment he’d followed her on rue Montmartre.
Slowly, in stages, awareness returned.
There had been the fevered reach for release, then the blinding climax that seized and flung her beyond pleasure with a white-hot explosion. And then she’d floated somewhere in a nothingness for a time.
Sense of touch returned first. Their bodies were still joined, his cock still partially hard.
His chest rested on her back, hairs scratchy against her skin.
Both of them were slicked with sweat. He still held some of his weight braced on his elbows; she could appreciate now as she had not in the moment that he had been mindful of her smaller frame.
His head was turned so that one of his cheeks was resting just towards center of her right shoulder; his stubble prickled as he breathed through his mouth.
His hands were still on her breasts. He seemed to become aware of the last at the same time she did for his thumbs stroked slowly once, lightly, over her nipples, and then again.
A weak stab of pleasure pulsed through her despite the languor engulfing her body.
She shifted slightly beneath him. The wetness of their coupling, his and hers, was between her thighs.
She smelled faintly but not unpleasantly the sweat from their bodies; under that the fading scents of their soaps and over it the sharp smell of sex. His breath, warm and still somewhat labored, was near enough to catch traces of liquor from earlier.
Nothing, absolutely nothing in her marriage to Jamie, mutually pleasurable as it was, had prepared her for the sheer carnality of what had just happened.
She hadn’t any idea what to say.
After a few more minutes, during which time she became aware of distant noises from the floor below, Nathaniel disengaged from her. He left the bed. Water splashed in the basin. He returned with a damp flannel; at this domestic nicety, her cheeks grew incongruously hot given what had just occurred.
He extinguished the lamp beside the bed and then his body was against hers, the blankets pulled up against the room’s chill.
He was warm and solid; she clutched onto him.
She was grateful to be held. She had the wild thought that if it weren’t for his arms anchoring her, she might fly off into the ether.
Even though he was part of the reason why.
“Can you sleep now?” His voice was barely audible against her ear. He traced a finger along her hairline and on around her jaw, thumb pausing on the pressure point beneath her chin where her pulse was strongest.
“Perhaps.” A lie. She wouldn’t sleep, at least for some time. She had never been gifted with finding sleep with ease, least of all when her mind was crowded.
Willfully she suppressed recall of what had just taken place, instead looking towards the meeting tomorrow, of the tangible danger presented by Dubois.
He did not trust Nathaniel, and he had made that remark to her about her eyes . . . She would be face-to-face with Compton, who had seen her sister, regardless of whether Thérèse truly was Lucy. And if Thérèse was Lucy . . .
That might come to nothing, she cautioned herself.
Perhaps the eyes were just a very cruel coincidence.
She must not hope for too much, even though this was more than she had truly dared believe she would find.
If Thérèse was Lucy, that meant she now had a protector, that Lucy had not ended up in a brothel or worse.
She clung to that possibility as well. There were nuances to the demimonde that she had truthfully never before considered.
Conversations with Amélie had opened her eyes.
But becoming part of that world was not a matter of survival for Lucy as it had been for Amélie.
Lucy had loved a young man who had turned out to be not only feckless but immoral enough to hand her over to Compton.
That alone was a betrayal she could hardly fathom. As for what happened after Theodore Garnewood left Lucy . . . She shied now from considering the possibilities too closely.
Inevitably her thoughts returned to Le Repaire itself: Dubois’s veiled threats, his suggestion of the salle écarlate.
What had followed afterwards, there. What had just happened, here. Nathaniel had cautioned her before, what it would be like, and she’d accepted it—no, wanted it. Even though she hadn’t entirely understood.
And she would do it again now that she did understand.
This time in Paris—no, extending back all the way to Brussels, when she had stayed to nurse the wounded rather than immediately returning home to her family.
That was a bridge, perhaps. There was very much a before, sharply delineated by Jamie’s death, and an unwritten future ahead as some entirely different woman with a vastly different life than she’d expected.
At present her sister’s fate, and the direction of her own life, rested in Nathaniel’s hands. She lay now in his arms, just at this moment safer than anywhere else she could envision, and yet the entirety of him was still a stranger to her.
Perhaps it was that. Perhaps the unreality of their situation was the foremost reason she’d taken Nathaniel as lover rather than despite it.
It was assuredly impermanent no matter what came of finding Lucy or thwarting Compton’s future schemes, however everything resolved—or didn’t.
Whatever she and Nathaniel might do with one another privately would not, could not, signify six months from now.
One month, even. Had she sought that specifically, unknowingly?
What they’d just done was . . . extraordinary. She’d been nearly outside her body with animal desperation. Every nerve and sinew still sang now with recall of it. The depths of her own ravaging need had shocked her. How to reconcile it with her conception of herself?
She didn’t want to tonight; even if she tried, it would prove impossible while he held her, their nude bodies pressed together.
This was not love or anything like it. She would nonetheless have to make a reckoning with herself. Someday. Not tonight.