One Naughty Night2 (31 page)

“Aidan!” she protested.

He grinned down at her. “I’m not the only one who has been naughty, now, am I?”

“Aidan.” She tried to move her bound hands, but the
chain was wrapped around something on the chaise and she was stretched out before him. Under his power. It should have made her panic, scream in protest and fear. Yet somehow as she looked up into his eyes, she felt… safe. Safe, and full of a fresh, hot surge of desire.

She arched up in silent entreaty, and his smile turned satisfied. His hand slid between her legs again, pressing her thighs wider apart. His finger slid into her again, then another and another, delightfully rough and calloused against her sensitive skin. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the sensations of his touch. He bent his head and his lips slid over her cheekbone, the pulse that beat in her temple.

“I think they’re almost done in there,” he said.

Lily listened carefully and found that the man’s screams had turned to whimpers. “Then you should hurry, shouldn’t you?”

His lips curved in a smile against her. “Ah, so sad. I do like having you bound here at my mercy.”

“Be nice and I might let you do it again.”

“Aren’t I always nice, Lily?” His hand eased away from her, and she felt him kneel between her legs, the tip of his manhood stretching her as he slid into her, one slow inch at a time. “Very, very nice.”

Lily moaned. He slid deeper, deeper, until suddenly he drew back and plunged in to the hilt. His hips circled over hers, pulling him even closer than she would have thought possible.

“You’re being very nice right now,” she said. She longed to touch him, to run her hands through his hair and over the taut muscles of his naked back where the shirt fell away, but she was bound. All she could do was arch
herself tighter against him, closer until she wasn’t sure where he ended and she began. They were as one being.

“Take me, Aidan,” she said, and his hips pistoned faster, harder. She met him thrust for thrust, the tension inside of her growing hotter and tighter until she feared she would break with it. She cried out incoherently, her hips twisting under his until the pleasure building in her shattered. She cried out his name.

His body tightened over hers, his hips suddenly still. “Lily,” he whispered, just before he came with a deep shudder. He sank down onto the chaise beside her, reaching up to unfasten the manacles.

Lily sighed and turned her face away to stare blindly at the red-painted wall. She suddenly felt so vulnerable, so sad, and she didn’t know why. He took her hand in his, and she felt the soft, gentle touch of his lips on the faint red marks on her wrist. She suddenly wanted to snatch her hand away, to curl into a ball and cry.

But there was no time for that, no time to decipher why she suddenly felt that way. The room next to theirs was silent now.

Aidan rolled off the chaise, and she heard him gathering his clothes and putting himself together again. She slowly sat up and shook her skirts down over her legs as she looked for her underthings. She had just found them under the gilded legs of the chaise when the door opened and Jasmine stood there.

She smiled as she studied Lily and Aidan. “Well, now. It looks like you two kept yourselves busy. Marie says you want to find my sister?”

Aidan held on to Lily’s arm as they made their way down the narrow alley. Rough stone walls rose up close on either side, and the smell of rotting garbage and the tang of the nearby river were strong there, but it was strangely quiet. The doors and windows were closed up tightly.

Lily was quiet too. She had said barely a word since they left Madame Marie’s, just walked with him and followed his lead as they looked for the address where Jasmine said her sister could usually be found. Her face looked very calm and still under the folds of her shawl, all her emotions hidden from him. Had it all been too much, Marie’s place, the rough sex?

“Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

She nodded. “Perfectly so.”

She said nothing else, and Aidan decided to leave her to her thoughts—for now. They had an errand to do. But he wouldn’t let her hide much longer.

“I think this is the place,” he said as he studied the building at the end of the alley. It looked just like all the others, dark and rough, the windows shuttered, but the peeling, black-painted door was marked with mysterious white Oriental symbols. A short flight of stone steps led down to another door at the basement level.

They made their way down the stairs, their boots thudding on the chipped stone, and Aidan pounded on the door. Lily pressed close to his side, still silent and watchful.

A tiny, elderly woman with a shriveled face and tangled gray hair opened the door a crack and peered outside.

“Jasmine sent us to find Ruby,” Aidan said. She tried to slam the door, but he blocked it with his boot. “You don’t want to turn us away,” he said in a hard, unyielding tone.

The woman muttered something in a language that
sounded like Russian or Polish. She glared at him from tiny black eyes, but she pulled the door open.

“Does everyone do what you say?” Lily whispered in his ear.

“If they know what’s good for them.”

The old woman led them down a dark, narrow corridor and into an open room at the end. It felt almost like stepping into hell, a black, hazy space broken by red-orange circles of light from oil lamps. Sparks flared as pipes were lit and then went out. A thick, sticky-sweet cloud hung over everything.

Lily’s fingers convulsed on Aidan’s sleeve, and he glanced down at her in concern. She studied the room with a small frown on her brow, and he remembered what she had told him—her mother had been an opium addict.

Had Sandrine been one of those figures slumped on grubby mattresses on the floor, inhaling the smoke from their pipes and falling back with eyes closed, in a stupor? Had Lily watched this every day, breathing the cloying fumes of the drug as her mother’s perfume?

The old woman gestured toward a raised couch in the corner. “Miss Ruby,” she said, and vanished into the darkness.

Aidan wrapped his arm protectively around Lily’s shoulders. “Do you want to wait here?” he asked in a low voice. “I can talk to her, find out what we need to know, and then we can leave.”

Lily leaned against him, but she shook her head. “She won’t want to talk. She’s off in her own world. I know how to get information from someone when they’re on opium.”

“Did you have to find your mother in places like this?”

“No, she never came to the dens. She didn’t smoke it. She drank it in wine, and working at Madame Josephine’s
had its perks—her bottles were delivered to her.” She gave a bitter little smile. “She couldn’t help herself.”

She hurried toward the couch in the corner, her shoulders held stiff and her head high as if she were marching bravely into hell itself. Aidan caught up with her and they both knelt beside the woman stretched out on her side on the couch, the paraphernalia of opium smoking on a table beside her, the pipe and lamp and the small, sticky gray ball in a dish.

The woman looked much like Jasmine, tall and dark-haired, but she was as thin and pale as an ephemeral ghost. Her hair was tangled where it fell on her shoulders, left bare by a loose bodice. She stared up at them with dull, uninterested eyes. Her bony fingers caressed the pipe.

“Who’re you?” she said.

“Your sister Jasmine sent us,” Lily said. Her lips were drawn into a tight line as she studied the wasted woman in front of her. Aidan knew he wasn’t the only one who could get people to listen.

“Did she now? She knows I won’t leave here.” Ruby gave a dry laugh that ended on a cough. “She’s always trying to rescue me.”

“Not this time,” Aidan said. “She said you could give us information.”

“About what?”

“About the whereabouts of Tom Beaumont.”

Ruby’s drowsiness vanished, and her eyes narrowed. She tried to sit up but couldn’t. “If I knew where that piece of shit was, I would stay far away. I never want to see him again.” She turned her head to show a long, thin scar along her jaw, her earlobe sliced away into a mass of scar tissue. “He did
this
to me.”

“You’re not the only one who would like to see the last of him,” Lily said. “That’s what we’re trying to do. But we need your help.”

Ruby gave a soft snort. “You need more than that to take down the likes of Beaumont. But good luck to you.”

Aidan grabbed her arm to keep her from rolling away. “When was the last time you saw him?”

Ruby closed her eyes as if to sink back into her stupor. Her arm was limp in his grasp, and he let her go. But Lily bent down and shook her hard by the shoulders. “Where is he?” Lily demanded.

“I don’t know,” Ruby answered. “But I know someone who might. My friend Sarah, over in the Devil’s Acre. She can’t stay away from him, the stupid slut.”

“Give us her address,” Lily said. Once that information was secured, they left Ruby to her opium dreams again. The alleyway was just as deserted as before, but the sky was beginning to lighten and a fog was rolling in off the river. The night wouldn’t last much longer.

Lily leaned against Aidan’s shoulder and he looked down to see the pale, tired strain on her face. “Where is your family, Lily?” he asked.

“A new play opens tonight,” she said wearily. “They won’t miss me for a while.”

“Then come on,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist. “We’ll go back to my lodgings for a few hours.”

“Shouldn’t we—”

“No,” he said firmly. “We’ll need our rest and something to eat if we’re going to find Beaumont, and you look like you’re ready to faint. Come and sleep in my bed for a while.”

Such a pretty, pretty girl.

Lily felt a soft, fleeting touch on her hair, and she almost screamed until she realized it was only a dream. A hazy, cloudy, smoky dream, but one she couldn���t free herself from.

She could smell sweet rose-musk perfume and the heavy, cloying scent of opium that was thick in the back of her throat. She twisted around to see that it was her mother who stroked her hair, who spoke to her softly in that musical French accent. Sandrine lay back on her pink satin chaise, her dark hair trailing around her in mermaid waves, her eyes slumberous from the drug. She trailed her white, soft fingers down Lily’s cheek.

“So very pretty,” she murmured. “Just like me,
non?”

“No,” Lily whispered. She was overwhelmed by the flood of so many emotions she had suppressed and denied for so long. Grief and memory, regret, love. “No, I’m not like you.”

Sandrine laughed. “But of course you are, ma petite. You can’t escape what you are, where you come from. I am part of you.” Her smile turned teasing. “Your fine gentleman seems to appreciate that about you. My talent. The touch of the gutter…”

“No!” Lily frantically shook her head, but Sandrine just laughed. She reached for her glass of wine, but it spilled, a torrent of bright bloodred on the pink satin and her mother’s white skin.

Lily tried to run from it, but a rough hand caught her and spun her around. She found herself caught by Tom Beaumont, who laughed at her struggles and her screams. The more she tried to flee, the more trapped she became.

“Please, please…”

“Please!” Lily sat up straight, and for an instant, she didn’t know where she was. The remnants of the dream clung to her, like the last cold wisps of a fog, and she half feared she was a child again, huddled in the meager shelter of a stone doorway. But then she heard a breath beside her, and she twisted around to see Aidan sleeping on the bed, and she remembered they were in his lodgings.

When they stumbled in during the sunrise hour, they had fallen fully dressed amid the bedclothes and down into exhausted slumber. Aidan lay sprawled on his back, his arms flung out. His hair was rumpled over his face, and Lily sighed as she studied him.

How much he had done for her, this man. He had chased villains all over London, through slums and brothels and gutters, fought and ran and literally carried her when she needed it. She had never had a champion
before. She had always been alone. But now, even with Tom Beaumont at large in the city, even with the past so close she could reach out and touch it like a bony-fingered phantom, she had somehow never felt
less
alone.

Aidan was so much more than she would have thought him to be. And he made her begin to think she could be more too.

“Oh, Aidan,” she whispered. “I am so sorry I dragged you into this.” She tucked the loose blankets around his shoulders and slid out of bed. She couldn’t sleep any longer, but he needed to.

Lily went to the window and eased back the edge of the curtain to peer outside. It was still night, but the sky was starting to turn pale gray at the edges. Soon the streetlamps would be put out and a new day would begin, but she wanted to hold that light back and stay in this quiet, still moment, where she was with Aidan and nothing could touch them.

She glanced back at the bed where he slept, and her heart ached at the sight of his face against the rumpled sheets. When had she let her caution down enough for him to slip inside? She couldn’t remember—it seemed he had always been there, always been a part of her. When he was torn out of her life again, would something inside of her rip open and bleed?

“Oh, Aidan,” she whispered. She spun away from the sight of him and sat down at a desk in the corner, seeking some kind of distraction. There were haphazard stacks of books there and a pile of manuscript pages closely covered with Aidan’s bold, black handwriting. Several of the words and lines were crossed out and overwritten with others.

Lily noticed the familiar cadence of stage directions
and dialogue and remembered when he told her he wanted to write plays the first night they met. So he
did
write plays, here in the quiet of his room. What did he pour out onto the page? Unable to help herself, she reached for the top page and scanned the words written there as if they would give her some clue to the enigmatic man who had come to mean too much to her.