Robin Schone (5 page)

unaffected by the pending loss of a woman's innocence.

He smelled of expensive soap; underneath that she breathed the faint aroma of tobacco and perfume

that had pervaded the downstairs saloon.

The top of his head was level with her breasts; the toes of her worn shoes were scant inches away from

the toes of his suede-and-black-patent boots.

The advantage of height was no advantage at all. Victoria had no doubt whatsoever who was the

strongest. The quickest.

The most dangerous.

He stared at her breasts for long seconds, at her nipple that peeped through the mane of hair hanging

over her right shoulder.

His lashes were long. Thick. Dark as chimney soot. They cast dark, jagged shadows on his pale,

flawless skin.

Only now he was not so pale. Dusky pink edged his high cheekbones.

Victoria could feel her nipples lengthening, hardening underneath his gaze.

Slowly, his lashes lifted. Silver eyes riveted hers.

“I don’t
want
to want...” she whispered fiercely, feeling ineffably vulnerable.

She had never wanted to want... a man’ s touch, a man’s kisses, a man’ s passion ...

The thin prick of his pupils dilated, silver metamorphosing into black. “Desire is a part of all of us,

mademoiselle.”

Victoria’s throat inexplicably tightened. “You do not seem ... afflicted ... by these desires.”

Regret skidded across his face, was swallowed by the blackness of his pupils. “Desire is not considered

to be an affliction by some.”

But it was by him, Victoria all at once realized.

This man fought his needs, as she fought hers. Afraid to want, unable to stop either the fear or the

desire.

“Is that why you came to the House of Gabriel tonight... to find a woman who does not deny her needs?

” she asked hesitantly.

A pulse pounded deep inside her vagina, once, twice, thrice; a matching pulse ticked inside his cheek,

once, twice,
thrice. . .

“How far will you carry this game, mademoiselle?” he asked in a curiously harsh voice.

“It is not a game when a woman gives her virginity to a man,” Victoria replied unevenly.

“What if I want more than your virginity?”

Flyaway strands of hair aureoled his head, creating a silver halo.

She realized where she had seen this man before: she had seen his likeness inside stained-glass

windows. He had the face of an angel.

An angel who brought salvation with one hand and destruction with the other.

Tears pricked her eyelids. “That’s all I have.”

“You have seen men with women.”

The images Victoria had seen over the last six months—of hurried couplings and open gropings—was

reflected in his eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

There was nothing she had not seen these last six months.

“Then you know there are many ways that men want women.”

Heat and coldness raced up and down Victoria’s spine.

This was blunt speaking, indeed.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever taken a man into your mouth, mademoiselle?”

The warm breath laving her skin was suddenly ice-cold against the scalding heat that crawled down her

neck and chest. “No.”

Light and shadow glimmered inside his eyes. “But you would do this ... for me?”

Victoria fought a lifetime of inhibitions. “Yes.”

For this one night...

With this one man ...

“Do you speak French?”

“Un petit peu,”
she admitted.
A little.

Enough to teach grammar to children. But he would not want to know her prior profession. After this

night neither would ever see the other again.

The prick of the steel pins inside her right palm arced up her arm.

“The French have an expression called
empétarder”
he said, marble skin glowing like candle-warmed

alabaster. “Are you familiar with it?”

“Petarader
means to ... to backfire,” Victoria said shakily.

Breasts swollen. Nipples hard.

“Empétarder
is an antonym,” he murmured, gauging her reaction.

“It is used purely in a sexual content, meaning to receive something through the back.”

Through the . .. back.

Victoria’s breath caught in her throat.

Her comprehension shone in his dilated pupils.

“Would you grant me access there, mademoiselle?” he asked deliberately, provocatively. “Would you

share your body with me ... in whatever way I asked?”

Victoria’s instinctive response was to recoil.

No.

The darkness inside his gaze would not let her recoil.

“Yes. If that is what you wish.”

“But would you take pleasure in such a possession?”

“I. . .”
Don’t k now.
Victoria swallowed; her breasts bobbed with the motion; breasts he had yet to

touch. “Pleasure is always preferable to pain.”

“There is always pain in pleasure, mademoiselle,” he said in a strangely remote voice. “The French

sometimes refer to an orgasm as
la petite mort,
the little death. Would you share your pain ... as well as

your pleasure?”

The little death . . .

There was no
little
death on the streets of London; every one of them was fatal.

“I would try,” she said.

“You would let me hold you when both of our bodies are dripping with sweat and the scent of our sex

fills our lungs,” he said, a statement rather than a question.

His words were electrifying.

“No one has ever held me,” Victoria confessed unbidden. No one save a child .. .

But Victoria did not want to think about that. Not tonight.

“But you would let
me
hold you,” he persisted.

Dripping with sweat.
The scent of their sex filling their lungs.

She took a deep breath, smelling the faint, clean, masculine scent that was uniquely his. “Yes.”

Victoria would let him hold her.

“And you would hold me.”

The barrenness inside his eyes squeezed her heart. He did not believe a woman would want to hold him.

Or perhaps he did not believe a
whore
would want to hold him.

“Yes,” Victoria said.

“Because I would give you two thousand pounds,” he prodded.

“Yes,” Victoria lied.

It was not for two thousand pounds that she would share her body with him: this man had touched her

with his words if not his body.

A tiny warning bell rang inside Victoria’s head. It chimed that it was the height of presumption for a

woman such as she—a woman who had no experience—to assume that a man such as he yearned for

intimacy.

Victoria ignored the warning.

His hair was longer than fashion prescribed; it curled over his collar.

Feeling curiously weak yet infinitely powerful in her femininity, she reached out a trembling hand to

touch a spun silver curl.

There was no warning, no protest of wood to signal that he moved, but suddenly the distance between

them spanned far more than the inches that separated their bodies.

“Get dressed, mademoiselle,” he said flatly. “And tell me the name of the man who hired you.”

G
et dressed,
reverberated inside Victoria’s ears. It was followed by,
And tell me the name of the man

who hired you.

Abruptly she became aware of the fireplace that warmed her buttocks and her breasts that all at once

felt like blocks of ice.

Heavy.

Cumbersome.

Undesirable.

She did not understand the blond-haired man’s dismissal. She did not need to.

Rejection was rejection in any language, whether it be verbal or physical.

Holding on to her pain, Victoria stepped back.

Her left heel turned.

She wildly grabbed ... the white cloth.

Hairpins rained down on top of black marble.

Slamming heavily into the desk, she stared down through twin streamers of dark, lifeless hair at a pistol.

The grip was carved out of rosewood, body a dull blue-back. It was the same color as her father’s hair, she

noted numbly. And then there was only the dull blue-black metal visible, wood swallowed up by long,

elegant fingers.

Head snapping back, Victoria dropped the napkin. At the same time she pushed away from the desk.

Light bled into the man’s pupils until the black of his pupils were two tiny pinpricks and his irises turned

into molten silver.

There was no passion inside them. No compassion.

No evidence of the intimate words he had spoken.

Immediately an image of her corpse clothed only in sagging stockings and worn half boots popped into

her mind.

She did not want her corpse to be found dressed in sagging stockings and worn half boots and her hair

tangled about her.

Words pushed up inside her throat; she swallowed them. She had said she would not beg. And she

would not.

“Are you going to kill me?” Victoria asked evenly.

Creaking wood was her answer.

The silver-eyed man lithely stood up; at the same time he slid the pistol underneath the right lapel of his

dress coat into a holster that hung underneath his arm, a flash of brown leather that was immediately

swallowed by the fall of his coat. Turning, he rounded the black-marble-topped desk and strode across the

plush maroon carpet, black coattails smoothly flapping,
left,
right,
left,
right. He scooped up her clothes, taut

buttocks straining against black silk trousers.

Silk and wool slapped her chest.

Victoria reflexively caught her clothes.

He was as elegant from the back as he was from the front.

But it wasn’t his back that now confronted her.

Cold gray eyes dismissed her nakedness and her worth as a woman, virgin or otherwise. “Should I kill

you?” he asked imperturbably.

It seemed as if she had lived with the threat of death all her life.

Victoria trembled—legs, hands,
stomach.

Not for the life of her would she give him the satisfaction of showing her fear.

Raising her arms, she defiantly jerked worn wool over her head, arms tangling with silk, clearing.

Leaning forward, she stepped into her drawers. Hours passed, fastening the two tiny buttons on the

waistband of her silk drawers. Days passed, fastening the wooden buttons lining the bodice of her wool

dress.

His silver-gray eyes were waiting for hers.

“I am a virgin,” she said evenly. “And I do not have a”—six months earlier she would not have known

the word by which men who lived off the revenue a woman’s flesh brought were called— “pimp.”

Silver ice glittered inside his eyes. “I am fully aware of your virginal status, mademoiselle.”

Victoria sucked in air; it did not still the pounding of her heart.

The desire that only moments earlier had tightened her breasts and pooled moisture between her thighs

continued to pound and throb, a beast that had yet to realize it had died.

Victoria took a calming breath; it did not calm her. “Then I am afraid I do not understand what it is that

you want to know.”

“I want to know why you are here.”

“I thought that was obvious, surely,” she returned, blood throbbing, heart pounding.

“A man sent you here, mademoiselle. I want his name.”

“No man sent me,” she repeated. At least not directly.

But she would not be here if it were not for a man.

“Then a woman sent you.”

“I was not sent here by a woman.”

His voice sharpened. “Who gave you money to bribe the doormen?”

She would
not
panic.

“I did not bribe the doormen.”

“My house is not a common pub, mademoiselle.” His gaze was implacable. “How did you get past my

doormen, if you did not bribe them?”

My
house.
My
doormen.

Dread premonition mingled with Victoria’s fear and anger and throbbing desire. “Are you the proprietor

of this night house?”

His silver eyes did not reveal so much as a flicker of emotion. “I am Gabriel.”

Gabriel. The House of Gabriel.

Dear Lord. Victoria had said she had come to the House of Gabriel in the hopes that he would be there.

A woman’s first time should be with a man such as you,
she had said.

Did he think she had deliberately crashed his house in order to gain his interest?

“Are you French?” she asked impulsively. And wondered if the last six months had addled her brains.

What difference did it make what his nationality was?

A Frenchman could shoot a woman as easily as an Englishman.

“I am French,” he agreed coolly. “One last time, mademoiselle. How did you get past my two doormen?

”

Victoria remembered the two men who had guarded the entranceway: one had possessed hair that

glinted like spun gold instead of the spun silver that the hair of the man who stood before her shone like; the

other doorman had had hair that gleamed like rich mahogany wood.

Their beauty paled in comparison with that of their employer.

“I told them I was in need of a protector,” she said shortly. Wondering if he would believe her.

Wondering why he wouldn’t believe her.

“And they let you in?” he asked caustically, silver eyes glinting a warning.

Victoria squared her shoulders. “I am not in the habit of lying, sir.”

“Are you not?”

There was no mistaking the cynicism in his voice.