A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man (11 page)

And aroused. I could feel the throbbing of my nethers even past the pounding of my pulse. If I wanted to, I could turn and flee at this moment, before we had so much as greeted each other.

I stayed.

It was more than the need to learn to be the most brilliant courtesan who had ever lived—I was ever enterprising—for I already had a contract negotiated with Robert through the Swan. I did not need to prove my abilities to anyone.

“You are very quiet.” The man came closer to me.

I managed to choke out something idiotic. “Yes, sir.”

He stopped before me, so close that I had to tilt my chin up to see his face.

Heaven help me, the mask excited me more. I had wanted something anonymous, something wicked and deliciously sinful. I very much feared I had found it.

“Well, my silent lady, I must tell you that I don’t approve. I wish you to speak.”

To say what? My mind scrambled. “Yes, sir.” Goodness, watch me wax brilliant.

He brought one hand up to take my chin between his finger and thumb. I jerked slightly when he touched me, for the warmth of his skin was like fire on mine. He gazed down at me for a long moment.

“Say ‘cock.’”

If he had asked me a fortnight ago, I would have answered without the slightest embarrassment, for to me it simply meant “cockerel” or “rooster.” No longer. The Swan had told me that men used it to describe their male parts.

His touch roughened ever so slightly, giving my head a tiny admonishing shake. “We will not make it through the first Sin tonight if you cannot say such a simple word.”

I swallowed dry. “C-cock.”

“Try it again.”

I firmed my shivering belly. “Cock.” I was pleased that it came out so confidently.

“Cunte.”

I only blinked at him in confusion. I had never heard the word. He smiled. His lips were perfect. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

“I have a cock. You have a cunte. Say ‘cunte.’”

Oh. It was a word for my nethers. A very naughty word, I knew without being told. The twist of his lips gave that away. He wanted to hear me say dirty words.

At last a flare of my customary audacity warmed my shaking innards. I met his gaze, licked my lips and used the Swan’s trick of dropping my tone. “Cunte,” I said. I practically moaned it.

Now he was the one gazing at my mouth. I was very pleased until he upped the ante.

“Say ‘fuck.’”

Oh heavens. Now he was being truly obscene. I took a breath, determined. “F—” I took another breath. “Fu—”

He grunted a short laugh. “Before the night is over, you will say ‘Fuck my cunte with your cock.’ You will say it over and over again. In fact, you will scream it out loud.”

Oh damn. My knees buckled a little, I confess, but I firmed them with nothing but the power of my will and met his gaze. “Then perhaps you had best stop wasting the night, sir, because that might take a while.”

His answer was to slide his hand around the back of my neck and tug at the bow tied there. I gasped as the chiffon nightdress slithered off me like a fall of water. I was entirely naked, gleaming and pale before his clothed darkness. I quickly pulled my hair forward to let it flow over my breasts and then clasped my hands before my nethers. My cunte.

He did not move or speak for a long moment, but only gazed at me through the eyes of the mask. Inscrutable.

I hate inscrutable.

However, my total vulnerability left me too unsure and unnerved to be saucy any longer. I was full of horse apples. I was not brave, or daring, or any of the things I’d imagined when I’d concocted this outrageous plan. I was a girl, an almost virgin, too terrified to do anything but stand there while he violated me with his eyes.

The moment stretched on and on. The suspense became too much for me. I am not a patient person. I shifted restlessly from one foot to the other. I twisted my hands in the way that so frustrated my aunt. I fidgeted.

He folded his arms and watched me.

Finally I could take no more. “What are you looking at?”

“When you fidget, your breasts jiggle most enticingly. I was merely enjoying the show.”

I looked down to realize with horror that my restlessness had caused the curtain of my dark hair to part over my breasts, displaying them quite thoroughly.

“I especially like the way your nipples thrust forward so impudently.” His voice had changed, going from husky whisper to male growl. “They are very pink. They will redden somewhat when I suck them.”

Oh. I wanted him to suck them. I wanted him to suck them hard, to pull them into his hot mouth and tug at them until I screamed his name.

I didn’t know his name.

“‘Sir’ will do for now,” he said when I asked. “The Swan told me that your name is Ophelia.”

“Yes.” Don’t think about nipple-sucking.
I can’t help it.
Don’t. It was too late, however. I felt a rush of dampness between my thighs. I cleared my throat. “Sir—”

“Yes, Ophelia?” He came close enough to brush my hair back over my shoulders, although he never took his eyes off my rigid nipples. His hands hovered just over my breasts, so that I felt the heat of his palms radiating against my chilled skin. So far he had not touched me other than my chin.

I wanted him to. “Sir, w—will you not remove your clothing as well?”

His eyes rose to meet mine. “In a hurry to beg for my cock, Ophelia?”

His eyes were dark as night. Onyx eyes, like an Egyptian god.

Or demon.

I truly didn’t care which. Perhaps a demon made for a better companion down a path of sin.

Then his hot hands fell softly onto my bare shoulders and I gasped. He moved slowly, circling me clockwise, never letting his hands leave my skin, sliding them over me, over my shoulder and neck and breastbone. Down my arm and up my inner arm. Around my waist and down over my hip. His hot palms left trails of fire on my flesh, burning memories of sensation. I almost expected them to glow in the dimness.

No one had ever touched me thus. I had never had a nanny or a governess. My mother had expected independence at a young age, so no one had even seen me in the bath since I was ten. I had washed and dressed and tended myself—so my skin was as virgin as the rest of me.

He despoiled my skin. He raided me as thoroughly as any Viking horde. He touched me everywhere, slipping his palms and fingers down over my belly, circling the globes of my buttocks, lifting and cupping my tight, tingling breasts, ravaging my innocent flesh with his hot, gentle stroking hands. Around and around me he moved, teasing, touching, smoothing. My body, my face, he even ran his fingers through my hair. My skin awoke as it had never before.

And it woke
hungry
. Like a caged creature too long unfed, it wanted more and yet more.

I was merely the prisoner inside the aroused vessel. I trembled, trapped in his web of teasing, taunting pleasure. His hands slipped between my thighs, but didn’t reach my dampened nethers.

Cunte. My dampened cunte.

The words mattered, I realized now. I
would
beg him eventually and it was important that my fevered mind find the right words to satisfy my starving flesh.

When his hot hands slid past the undefended parting of my buttocks, I closed my eyes.
Yes. At last.

He teased at the lips of my cunte. His fingers stroked up and down the slippery parting but did not enter, though I admit I did try to press back into his touch. He found a small, sensitive area just behind that that even I had never explored. The tip of his index finger, slippery from the exploration of the lips of my cunte, dipped swiftly into my anus, making me gasp and shudder with surprising pleasure, then moved on, up and over me once more.

Nothing was sacred. No inch of me was left pure. His touch invaded. It invited. It provoked and offended and aroused. I was dizzy with it, drunk on it, shaking and raw and stripped more naked than naked by it.

Then it grew less gentle. Not painful, but rougher, more demanding. He pushed, he squeezed, he pinched, he tweaked. My nipples grew hard and pointed under his taunting touch, my buttocks pink, my scalp tingled from his fingers fisting in my hair as he pulled my head back to thrust his slick fingers into my mouth, making me taste myself.

Salt. Cream.

I wanted him to thrust his fingers into my cunte in just that way. I was soaked with desire. He read my thoughts and ran a rough, hot hand down my belly to cup my cunte firmly. I quivered and closed my eyes. “Yes,” I whispered through dry lips.
“Please.”

Abruptly, he took my upper arm in his other hand and spun me to press against him, my back to his front. My tingling skin adored the scratch of his weskit buttons against my back. My sensitized buttocks recognized the giant bulge in his trousers as belonging to me and nestled against it confidently.

“What do you want, sweet Ophelia?”

I gasped and squirmed. His hand rubbed at my cunte roughly but did not pass the slick gates.

“Say the words, Ophelia.”

I moaned and writhed against him, fore and back, but he was relentless. “Say it.”

“Touch me,” I begged. “Please touch me.”

“I am touching you,” he said, hoarse and hot in my ear.

I whimpered in frustration. “No! Touch me inside!”

“That’s not what we call it, is it?”

“Fuck me!” I howled. “Fuck my cunte with your fingers!”

When his long, rough fingers slipped between the slippery folds of my cunte, I nearly screamed aloud from the relief. I bucked and squirmed against him until he had to pin me tight to his body with his other arm around my waist. Despite his earlier roughness, he penetrated me slowly, almost reverently. I could not move. I could only lean my head back against his shoulder and pant as he slid a single long finger deeply into me, all the way to the last knuckle. A long animal moan rose from my throat.

“The First Sin, my delicious Ophelia…” His breath was hot and moist against my ear, his voice rasping and deep.

“The First Sin is Lust.”

Eight

My entire body was aflame. I had never felt anything like this intense, wicked awakening. I was a mad creature, begging a masked stranger to do things to me that I had never dared imagine only a few short weeks before.

He stood behind me, still fully clothed against my bareness, having done nothing but touch me with his hands. How could such a simple thing as touch bring me to this state of wild abandon?

His long finger slid into me and then withdrew over and over while I quivered and whimpered in his grasp. My knees could scarcely keep me upright. If I fell to the carpet would he fall with me? Would he cover me with his large, warm body? Would he violate me on the floor while I begged for more?

Such dangerous thoughts were mere wisps of consciousness amid the tumult in my mind. For the most part, my awareness consisted of craving, aching, throbbing
need.
His rough horseman’s hands set me afire. His slippery finger thrust into me again and again, sliding up and down against the sensitive flesh of that secret little knob I had no name for. I became nothing but that small knob, or perhaps it grew to become me, for nothing existed in the world but that callused finger sweeping over me, thrusting into me, sending tremors through me. I felt a pull toward something I had never known before. I wanted something … something more …

That finger slowed, then stopped. I gasped and moaned in protest as it withdrew from my body inch by slippery inch. I felt raw and empty and unfulfilled. What madness was this?

“Not yet, sweet wanton,” that dark voice whispered in my ear.

When his enveloping arm released me I staggered, my shaking knees unable to sustain my weight. He carefully propped me against the bedpost, my bare back to the cool, carved wood. I put my hands behind me to hold on and let my head drop, hiding behind the fall of my hair while I tried to cling to that feeling. Where was I trying to go? I didn’t know, but I realized that it was not a place I knew how to find on my own. My body felt chilled and alone without his touch, without his solid presence, without his hot breath in my ear.

I needed this stranger, this “Sir.”

It should have been an alarming, even terrifying realization. I, who fought for my freedom, gave myself so willingly into the power of this unknown man. Yet I was not afraid. There was power in this discovery. There was freedom in my response to his large, wicked hands. Somehow I knew that if I could last the night, I would learn to fly.

I felt his big hands smooth my hair. He cupped my jaw in his palms and lifted my face. I gazed up at him, panting and shivering and quite unselfconscious in my nakedness.

“Say ‘fuck.’”

I drew a breath. “Fuck.” The wicked word came easily from my lips, for had I not screamed it a short while before? This obedient murmur was nothing in comparison.

“Naked and profane.” Those beautiful lips quirked. “And yet still so ladylike. I applaud you.”

It was ridiculous to feel proud of myself, like a child getting good marks, but I did. Yet were these not barriers to my goals that must be surmounted? I should be proud.

I have perhaps mentioned before that I am an exceptional student.

He still gazed down at me, his eyes entirely shadowed by the mask. What did he see? I had been so involved in my own experience that I had no thought of his needs.

That could not be the mark of a great courtesan.

So I lifted my hands and tentatively smoothed them over his chest, sliding my palms over his waistcoat, up under his surcoat and down again over his flat, hard stomach. His body was so firm beneath the fine clothing. I had never touched a man before but I had imagined something softer from a gentleman. Sir had the body of a laborer, the hands of a groom, and the clothing and manners of a lord.

Perhaps that was what was required of a hired lover. The Swan had emphasized that fitness and grace were most important to a courtesan’s career. A hired lover would be prized for his strength and power, would he not?

I suddenly longed to see that strength and power for myself.

“Would you not like to remove your clothing now, Sir?”