Games of Pleasure (6 page)

Her supple fingertip caressed his flayed nerves. His blood flamed. His eyes closed. He knew nothing but honeyed sensation. Silk rustled as she moved around the table. Orange and lavender and musk.

His mouth opened to the soft pressure of her lips. She tasted of cherries and cream, sugared rhubarb and candied ginger, all vivid with the sweet overtones of woman and wine. Drugged by need, he met her delicate tongue with his own. She caught his hands in both of hers to hold him pinned in his chair. Their shared pulse thundered between them, palm to palm.

It was a heady, willing surrender, though he reached for one last safe limit. Only a kiss! Just that! One kiss! Yet he kissed blindly, passionately, aching with tenderness at the supple generosity of her mouth.

Still kissing, she released his hands to run her fingers up his arms. She caught the back of his head in both palms. Pulling his mouth down with hers, she knelt in a crumpled spread of skirts between his spread knees. He ran his fingers through her hair, then his palms found her naked shoulders and smoothed up the long column of her throat above the black ribbon.

When she broke the kiss at last, he was laughing and groaning and desperate. Her fingers strayed over his back, pushed beneath his shirt, just as his palms found the swell of her breasts. He cupped them in both hands, the sweet weight through the silk, her nipples hard, thrusting beneath his thumbs.

A small moan fluttered from her lips as he pleasured her, then she kissed him again. While their lips sought and found, her fingers opened buttons to fold down the front of his trousers. Desire flamed, concentrated on that one throbbing center as she freed him and took his hard shaft in one hand. With sure strokes she rubbed up and down, tickling below the head with her thumb. His brain pulsed with colored lights. His whole body throbbed with exquisite sensations.

Ryder threw back his head to break the kiss—the last few brambles of the thicket catching at his conscience—but she seized both of his hands in hers once again and thrust them out to each side, before she lowered her head to take his hot organ into her mouth.

Intensity enveloped. Silken, exquisite. Her tongue danced. She played wicked games with her teeth. He knew only the sensations, as concentrated as lightning, as rapturous as orgasm—yet prolonged and prolonged as if she knew how to take him to the brink and keep him there, hovering in ecstasy.

He heard groaning as incoherent sounds of pleasure dragged up from his shaking lungs. His hands gripped hers convulsively. Her mouth plunged him into white oblivion. The ecstasy built, almost to climax. His head fell back, his muscles straining, her palms crushed in his. Yet with a last swirl of her tongue, she abandoned him. Frantic, throbbing, he opened his eyes.

She stood up and stepped back. He gazed up at her beneath heavy eyelids as she unbuttoned her dress at both shoulders. In a sweet shush of silk, it slid down about her ankles. Her eyes were huge and dark and compelling, her smile an enchantment of seduction. Dressed in nothing but her shift and corset, she leaned down to kiss his mouth once again. His breath burned in his lungs as she lifted her petticoat to straddle his lap. While they kissed and kept kissing, she impaled herself on his erection.

Ryder almost came back into his mind then, but not to draw back or deny her.

He was not, after all, such a saint.

Instead he buried his face in her shoulder and thrust hard, seeking to know her deeper, to explore all of her sweet mysteries. As he plunged and withdrew and thrust again, she caressed him inside with exquisite subtlety. He had never known such a feeling. All sweetness. All heat. All pleasure. When he drove up one last time with mind-shattering intensity, her muscles clenched and rippled until the rush of his seed stunned him into ecstatic oblivion.

A fine sweat broke all over his body. He dropped his head back, still cradling her in his arms, and fought for a calm breath. She entwined her arms about his neck, dropping small kisses on his face and hair.

“Ah, my sweet Sir Lancelot,” she whispered in his ear. “Not so humble, after all!”

“No, my friends call me Ryder—” He struggled for a coherent thought. “But I thought you wished to be rid of me?”

“Did you?” Her voice purred. “So what did you expect me to do when you insisted on staying?”

“I planned to go home.”

“No. You thought you shouldn't leave me alone.”

“I didn't trust you not to do something desperate.”

She snuggled closer, still balanced across his thighs. “You were right.”

He raised his head and looked into her eyes, wide and dark, filled with mystery and humor. His heart thundered.

“Who are you? I don't even know your real name.”

“Ah, not now! Morning is soon enough for our reckoning. After all, you've bound me by oath—I won't leave without either telling you the truth about my predicament or giving you a chance to help me. In the meantime, perhaps it just seemed simpler to act on a need we both shared so very plainly?”

Ryder studied her face. Yes, she had needed it just as much as he had. To reaffirm the desirability of her own existence? To recover her power and identity after her husband had so brutally betrayed her? If so, perhaps there was no sin in it. Nothing but the pure flame of passion, burning away hurt. Burning away doubt. Burning away duty and class expectations.

“Yes,” he said, a new awareness pulsing in his blood. “But wasn't it still a sin when Lancelot gave in so easily to Guinevere?”

“No.” Her eyes were fathomless. “She'd have died if he'd been less than generous. And now your need is for sleep, my lord, not to ride home through the storm like a madman.”

“My need,” he said, “is most certainly not for sleep.”

“Then you would like some more debauchery? The bed is really quite comfortable. Shall we retreat there?”

He was Blackdown's heir, the man responsible for thousands of tenants and dependents, a man of conscience and honor, a man who did not make love to other men's wives. Yet he felt more alive than Lord Ryderbourne had ever felt, as if Laurence Duvall Devoran St. George had suddenly been reborn. He groaned like a man whipped, picked her up with her legs still wrapped about his waist, and strode across to the bed.

He set her down on the sheets. As lovely as starlight she shuffled back against the pillows.

“And your need?” he asked.

“My need was only for a bright memory of my knight in shining armor.”

Ryder tugged off his boots, then wrenched his shirt away over his head.

“Not just one memory,” he said. “A whole night of them.”

HE HAD REFUSED TO MAKE HER A LOAN. HE WOULD NOT LET her leave. There was only one way to redeem the debt she already owed him and the further one she'd be forced to incur. It was not, of course, any sacrifice. Lord Ryderbourne was beautiful, firm and smooth, muscled like a racehorse. His nails, his hair, his skin, his teeth, all gleamed with vigorous youth and a lifetime of meticulous habits.

Yet the set of his mouth also betrayed a lifetime of control and responsibility. His eyes haunted her. The intelligence and natural joy burdened with all the trappings of position and conventional morality. Did he never escape? Did he never know indulgence?

Now he was just a little foxed, but he was far more deeply intoxicated by the pleasure she had given him. It went some way to redress the balance, that she could bring peace to the taut lines of his face. Yet Miracle had no intention of allowing him even a moment for reflection.

“Then, yes,” she said. “Come to bed, my lord! Our needs are the same.”

Lean, lash-hard, tall, and powerful, he threw aside his shirt. His dark gaze stunned in its intensity.

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.”

“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.”