Loving Julia (20 page)
“I’m tired of talking,” he said in a thick guttural voice Then before she had any inkling of his intention, he let his glass fall with a dull thud and slosh of splashing brandy and reached for her. Her own glass fell too as his hands closed over her upper arms, dragging her up so that she was half-lying across his lap.
“Sebastian!” Shocked by the unexpectedness of his action, her eyes were huge golden pools staring up into the narrowed, glittering slits of his. His face was flushed with drink and something else. His mouth was twisted into a sneering half-smile. A vein pumped visibly just above the open collar of his shirt, and his hands were vice-tight on her arms.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered, wincing with pain as his fingers tightened until they were digging deep into her soft flesh. He smiled, a tigerish smile that made her eyes widen. This was not Sebastian, not her Sebastian. This was a violent, brutal stranger.
“Good. I want to hurt you.”
The guttural mutter was not his voice. Julia writhed, trying to pull her arms free of his paralyzing grip. Suddenly this man was frightening her. The icy mask was gone, shattered into a thousand pieces. In its place was a tortured, twisted mortal man in pain himself and capable of inflicting pain.
“I’ll enjoy hurting you.” And then he dragged her up so that her head was pressed back against the crimson velvet squab of the chair. She was sitting on his lap, her legs bared to the knees by nightclothes that twisted across them, her eyes huge as he stared into them with that travesty of a smile twisting his lips. Staring helplessly back into those icy blue depths she thought she knew how the victim of a cobra must feel: mesmerized, incapable of any kind of movement. Although her legs were free, it never occurred to her to kick him; although she could have struggled and fought and screamed, that never occurred to her either. She just lay back against the velvet chair and returned him look for look with a kind of dreamlike fascination while he grew hard and heavy beneath her and his breathing quickened.
“Don’t, Sebastian.” Her voice was a husky, pleading murmur. It was the only protest she made as he leaned toward her, his eyes fixed on hers as his lips sought her mouth. A twisted grimace of a smile was his only response, and then his lips were on hers, not harshly, as she had expected, but soft, the merest whisper of a caress against her own. His mouth felt so warm, so right. At its touch a hot rush of feeling shot through her veins, and she moaned suddenly as all the exquisite memories of the last time he had kissed her came flooding back. Her eyes closed, and her arms came up to twine around his neck with the strength of the damned.
“Julia,” she heard him mutter, but she was beyond speech herself, beyond anything but this molten spiraling urgency to kiss and touch and caress.
His mouth opened over hers, his tongue tracing the outline of her lips before urgently demanding entrance. She opened her mouth for him, opened it wide and welcomed him, driven by a need so fierce that she was shaking with it. She could never have enough … His mouth was hot and hard and hungry as it took hers with an urgency that had her mewling tiny sounds of ecstasy. His hands were moving over her, as hot and hard as his mouth, touching her in places where she had never been touched, lingering over her breasts until her nipples ached with tension and she cried out and arched her back. His hands roamed further, molding her waist and thighs and the secret feminine nest where her legs joined.
She was on fire for him, incapable of speech or thought or anything but this hot liquid feeling, melting in his arms, his to do with as he pleased. Somehow they slid from the chair to the floor and she was lying on her back on the rug, the scent of spilt brandy and man heady in her nostrils, the shadowy beauty of him looming over her as he bared her body by pulling her nightclothes up to form a bunchy twisted line above her breasts, which ached and throbbed with need. His hands found the soft swelling shapes, cupping their pale roundness while his fingers stroked over the pebble-hardness of her nipples. Julia thought she would die with the pleasure-pain of it.
And still he was kissing her. Ravenous kisses that made her head spin and her senses reel, fiery kisses that awakened in her an answering fire, wonderful kisses, magical kisses, making her feel things she had never imagined she could feel.
He was lying on her now, heavy and solid, crushing her into the carpet so that she could almost feel each separate fiber as it imprinted itself into her spine. The smooth texture of his buckskins chafed at her legs, while the linen of his shirt was rough against her breasts and his buttons cut into her soft skin. She clutched his back, nails digging into the solid flesh beneath the shirt, reveling in the strength of his muscles. And then suddenly it occurred to her to want to feel his skin against hers.
She moaned, tugging at his shirt until it came free of his trousers and then burrowing her hands up beneath the soft linen to touch his flesh. Smooth, hot flesh over rippling muscles, slick with sweat. She ran her hands up over his back to his shoulder blades, nails lightly scoring his skin, her breath coming in fast little pants as he took her mouth.
“Christ.”
She barely heard the word, muttered as he shifted, doing something with his clothes. Moaning, she pulled him back to feel something hard and hot and naked pulsing against her thigh. His mouth claimed hers once again in a swift searing kiss, and then his head was moving lower, tracing a path across her face to her neck and then over the soft rise of an arching breast. He took the nipple in his mouth and she gasped. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, wonderful, marvelous, trailers of fire shooting down into her belly and thighs. He suckled her like a babe and she responded with soft little cries, her fingers on the back of his head, reveling in the soft silkiness of his hair as she pressed his face to her. His hands were moving too, stroking over her belly and the tops of her thighs before finding their way to the thick nest of black curls and stroking there too. She stiffened as he first touched her there, but his hard fingers were gentle as they slid between her legs, leaving liquid fire wherever they touched.
“Sebastian, oh, Sebastian.” She was moaning his name without even being aware she did so as he did the most unbelievable things to her with his fingers, touching her in ways she had never dreamt of, rubbing and caressing and holding her until her legs spread wide for him and she was writhing with pleasure. When finally she felt one finger work its way inside her, she could stand it no more. She cried out, stiffening, arching, and then he was groaning as his finger was removed and replaced with that hot naked male part of him that had been pressed so tightly against her thigh.
He thrust himself inside her, forcing himself in, pushing so that she feared she must split in two, and she didn’t care. She clung to him, head thrown back, eyes closed, as he possessed her, slowly at first, and then as she arched mindlessly against him harder and faster, his hands gripping her bottom as he held her still for his taking. She cried out at last, sobbing, her nails raking fiercely over his back as he thrust into her again and again, hurting her, but at the same time filling her with a fiery ecstasy that made the pain a small price to pay. She heard the hoarse gasp of his breathing, and answered it with her own. She felt his sweat drip onto her body to sizzle at the heat of her bare skin. She tasted the salt tang of his skin, smelled the musky scent of man, saw the gleam of taut, sweating back muscles as they flexed in the firelight. Then he was moving faster and faster, harder and harder, taking her with him, forcing her to writhe and cling and cry out as she tried to escape this fiery torment.
“Sebastian!” She moaned his name again as her hands slid down over his back to clutch at his steel-muscled buttocks. He cried out as she dug her nails into his hard flesh, and then drove into her with a force that sent her whirling, lost in a haze of smoke and fire and darkness. She felt him stiffen, shuddering, and then a cataclysmic ecstasy seized her and spun her away into a dark mindless void.
A long time later, Julia’s eyes fluttered open to the sound of stertorous snoring. First she blinked groggily. Then she became aware of a crushing weight sprawled across her, bearing her down into the carpet. Finally she grew conscious of several things at once: first, she was naked from just below the shoulders down; second, the snoring dead weight was Sebastian, and from the ear shattering quality of his breathing he was fathoms deep asleep; and third, she had just become his woman in the most primitive sense. Remembering what he had done to her and how it had made her feel, she felt fiery red color steal into her cheeks. Moving carefully so as not to waken him, she lifted her hand to touch his hair. That beautiful silver-gilt hair …
There was a soreness between her thighs, and the sensitive skin of her breasts tingled and ached. She had given up without a murmur of protest the prize she had always defended so valiantly in the face of such overwhelming odds. Remembering Mick, Willy Tilden, and the others before them who had wanted to do the man-woman thing with her, and remembering the way she had kicked and bit and fought to keep them off her when the occasion warranted it, she was amazed as she realized that she hadn’t even tried to defend herself against Sebastian. She could have fought him off, if she would have. Probably she would have needed to do no more than icily demand to be unhanded. Instead she had responded with a fierce ardor that had made the prize of her virginity merely an obstacle to be gotten out of the way.
Her body quivered even now as she remembered how he had kissed her, and touched and caressed and possessed her—Sebastian! Her own Sebastian, the most beautiful man she had ever seen in her life, who had once been as far above her touch as the stars, had made her his. For the first time in her life she belonged to someone, and what a someone: Sebastian.
His snores assaulted her ears, and she smiled, her hand coming up again to stroke the bright hair. What had happened had been unbelievable, both in the act itself and in how it had made her feel, but she did not regret it. No, she did not regret it in the least. Not with Sebastian.
Now she was his woman, and he would belong to her forever and ever. Would he marry her? Her mouth curved with amusement as she tried to imagine herself as the Countess of Moorland. Little Jewel Combs a countess? No, she corrected herself fiercely, not Jewel Combs, never Jewel Combs. The eighth Earl of Moorland could never marry Jewel Combs. But Julia Stratham—now that was a different person altogether. She was suddenly fiercely glad for the lessons and training that had made her a lady. For Sebastian. Her lips twitched suddenly as she considered how Sebastian had drummed one boring bit of knowledge after another into her head. The whole time he had been making her worthy of him, and he hadn’t even known it. But now, as he had said himself, Julia Stratham was a very lovely lady indeed, and a fit mate to spend life at his side.
Gradually she noticed that the fire had died to a heap of glowing ashes. The parts of her body that were not covered by his were cold, and all of her was uncomfortable. Her back ached and her legs were falling asleep and her neck was stretched into the most awkward position imaginable to accommodate his bright head wedged into the curve between neck and shoulder. She was glad she had awakened first, glad that she had had those few moments to get her thoughts in order. But now it was time for him to awaken too. Those blue eyes would open and meet hers and he would smile—what would he say? Julia suddenly blushed. She felt deliciously shy and uncertain, like a bashful child.
“Sebastian.” Tentatively she nudged the hard-muscled arm that sprawled across her middle. He was still wearing his shirt, and she had to fight an urge to run her hand over the linen covered muscle. Remembering the feel of those muscles, she blushed again. Becoming one with a man, this man, had been like nothing she had ever imagined. The mere memory was enough to take her breath away.
He didn’t move, didn’t by so much as a gasp or a twitch acknowledge her. Julia tried again, nudging him harder this time. When that didn’t work, she caught hold of the shoulder nearest her and gave it a good shake. The steady snores continued unabated, and Julia remembered the amount of brandy he had consumed. He had been the next thing to foxed…. He would probably sleep for hours, and nothing she did was going to wake him up. Just as well, she decided after a moment. She must look a mess with her clothing twisted about her body and her hair mussed into a mass of tangles that straggled down to her waist. When he saw her next, she wanted to be beautiful, and every inch a lady. Picturing how he would see her if he awoke now suddenly horrified her.
Getting out from under him was quite a trick, but by dint of much wriggling and shoving she managed it. When she was on her feet at last, tugging her clothes down and smoothing them, he lay on his back on the floor, eyes closed and mouth slightly open as he snored with abandon. Even like that, when most men would have looked at best slightly repulsive and at worst obscene,
he
was beautiful. The silver-gilt hair was wildly disordered, but disorder became him. The shadow of a surprisingly dark stubble had appeared to darken his cheeks and chin, but that became him, too. He was still fully dressed, she discovered, even to his boots. But his shirt was twisted around his waist so that an inch or two of pale skin stretched taut over ridged muscle was visible. She was fascinated to see a faint line of dark gold hairs trail downwards. His pantaloons were unbuttoned. As Julia absorbed that fact and its import, she felt hot color wash up over her neck and quickly averted her eyes. Even after having been so intimate with him, she was still ignorant of his body and its functions. She supposed that she would soon learn, just as she had learned everything else about being a lady. Sebastian’s lady.
She hated to leave him to spend the night on the floor, but there was no way she was going to be able to shift him by herself. And she blushed again at the very thought of asking Johnson or Leister to come and put their master to bed. They would guess what had happened at a glance.
