Vanquished (28 page)

Moaning, she raised her hips to meet him, her hand settling at the back of his head, urging him closer. "Hadrian, I never knew. I never imagined."

"Lie back and let me make you happy. Let me show you good it can be."

She obeyed, going back against the mattress. Dark hair splayed on the counterpane and creamy skin glowing, she arched to meet him. Still kissing her intimately, he lifted her stocking-clad legs until her feet were braced on his shoulders. He slipped both hands beneath her, cupping her buttocks and then pulling the firm lobes gently apart. Mouth hot on her sex, he found the ring of puckered flesh with his thumb and circled.

She moaned and bit down on her bottom lip. "Hadrian, what are you doing to me?"

"Pleasing you or at least I hope that's what I'm doing." He flicked his finger once more. "Do you like this? Does it feel good?"

"Yes, but--"

"No buts, only pleasure." He slid a finger inside her and pressed gently inward even as he circled her clitoris with the tip of his tongue.

"Oh God!"

She came then, little pulses that sent her woman's flesh fluttering against his mouth like the beating of butterfly wings. Staring down at the rosy pink of her throbbing sex, Hadrian knew he couldn't wait so much as another moment.

The tin of French letters was tucked away in his bedside table. Yanking open the drawer, he reached for them now, urgency warring with his heartfelt desire to make it good for her. Better than good. Magical. Knowing she wasn't a virgin somehow doubled his responsibility toward her. A bad sexual experience was a good deal harder to overcome than no sexual experience at all, and that her former fiance had used sex to degrade and humiliate her increased Hadrian's resolve to bring her as much pleasure as she would allow.

He lifted the lid and took one of the prophylactics out, unfurled the condom and rolled it over his turgid flesh as he had countless times before. Only this time was different, entirely so, than any other before it.

This time was with Callie.

When he turned back, she lay in the center of the bed watching him with large, luminous eyes. Eyes he knew would haunt his dreams for the rest of his days.

He climbed onto the mattress and straddled her, slipping hands down to knead her belly. "You have beautiful skin," he told her for the second time that night, both because it was true and something she desperately needed to hear.

Fitting himself to her, he glided inside, filling her in one sure stroke. She rose up to meet him, wrapping silk-sheathed legs tight about his waist. It had been a while since he'd been with a woman, and the sudden movement, coupled with the ghost tremors still firing off inside her, nearly pushed him over the edge.

When he could trust himself, he started to move back and forth very slowly, watching her face.

Callie eased back against the pillow, eyelids squeezed closed and body taut as a drawn bowstring. If they had time, another night at least, he would teach her to trust him enough to let him lash those lovely wrists of hers to his metal bedposts and show her just how sweet submission, total submission, could be. For now, he resolved not to waste so much as one second of their time together mourning what could never be.

He increased the pace, the pressure, slipping in and out of her slickness fast and hard as he touched her face, her throat, her breasts. "Open your eyes, Callie. I want to look into your eyes when you come." Reaching down between them, he found the rosy bud of her clitoris with his thumb, flicking over it once, twice . . .

Callie's eyes flew open. "H-a-d-r-i-a-n."

The spasms rocketing off inside her sent Hadrian over the edge. A final thrust was all it took to complete his climax. Coming hard and fast, he collapsed against her, head resting facedown on the pillow of one lovely flushed breast.

Callie was the first to recover. "Thank you." She ran a kneading hand down his sweat-sheathed back, fingers slipping in the slickness.

"My pleasure." He lifted his head and looked up into her sweet, sated face. "Has anyone ever told you before how delicious you are?"

He made a show of smacking his lips, which had her laughing and blushing in turns. She shifted her head from side to side on the pillow, a pantomimed "no."

"Pity, because you are. Absolutely succulent, in fact, speaking of which . . ."

He moved down the front of her, and found her with his mouth, again, spearing her with his tongue.

Her eyes shot open. She lifted up on her elbows to look down on him. "Hadrian, I'm spent, really, I don't think . . . I can't possibly. . ."

He raised his head from the tent of her splayed thighs and grinned up at her. "Is that a dare, Miss Rivers?"

Sometime later Hadrian lay propped on one elbow and turned on his side. Leaning over her, he circled the areola of one breast with a single finger. "Ashes of roses," he said so softly she couldn't be sure if she'd heard him properly.

"Sorry?" Callie cracked open an eye. She hadn't been asleep, not exactly, but rather catnapping, a delicious sort of slipping in and out of awareness.

"You are, just there. The same lovely dusky pink the London dressmakers call 'ashes of roses'." He lightly scratched the surface with his fingernail.

A delicious shiver shot from her breast to her toes. "Pinch me, will you?"

Looking up, he grinned. "With pleasure; but why?"

"Because that way I'll know I'm not dreaming, and that this is all real, that you're real."

"I'm real enough, make no mistake about that."

Before the situation went any further, she needed him to understand what he was coming to mean to her. Turning on her side to face him, she blurted out, "I think I've been waiting for you all my life."

His gaze shuttered. "You don't even know me, not really."

Rather than dispute that, she said, "Then tell me something about yourself, something personal."

His eyes met hers and despite being halfway to in love with him, the ice she saw there chilled her. "You should be careful, Callie. You might just get a taste of what you're asking for and find you don't like it overmuch."

"But I want to know everything or at least more than I do now which isn't all that much, not really."

He sighed. "You're like a dog with a bone, aren't you? You don't mean to give up 'til you've gnawed me down to the marrow." He rolled onto his back, stretched his arms and crossed them behind his head. "Very well, then, if you must know, Hadrian isn't my real name."

"Sorry?"

His mouth twisted, more grimace than smile, and for reasons unknown Callie felt a frisson of fear land in her belly and lower, those very areas that a moment before had been languid and pulsing. "Hadrian St. Claire, he's a persona, an invention if you will. For all intents and purposes, he doesn't exist."

She pushed up on one elbow. Gaze on his face, she pressed, "You're serious aren't you?"

"Yes."

She thought back to the day when he'd insisted on walking her about Bow. Both the street woman in the market and Sally Potts, the brothel madam, had called him Harry, at least at first. Was he some infamous criminal in hiding? How bad could it be? He wasn't Jack the Ripper, surely. If so, she'd have been eviscerated long before now. As it was, the only organ she stood in peril of losing was her heart. "Why change your name?"

"Because . . . well, why the devil not, there's no law against it. Theater people take stage names all the time. Why, look at that music-hall girl who's all the rage in Paris right now. Delilah du Lac she styles herself, but never think that's her real name. But it sounds all right, doesn't it?"

She'd set him on edge. She ought to leave off now but it was too late, she couldn't stop herself. "That woman in the marketplace and your friend, Mrs. Potts, they both called you Harry. That's you real name, isn't it?"

He nodded slowly. "Harry Stone."

"That's what they knew you as when you lived in Bow, before you went to the orphanage, the nice one in the country."

Looking almost relieved, he nodded again. "Roxbury House. It sounds odd, I know, but being sent there was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. Until then I'd never seen a true patch of blue sky before or tasted fresh milk or picked wild strawberries from an open field or . . . well, you grew up in the country. You know what I mean."

She leaned over him and brushed blond hair back from his brow. "I rather fancy you as a Henry." She tried to sound light, teasing even, but the magic was lost to them now. Her fault, of course, for throwing open the lid on Pandora's Box.

A frown marred the brow she'd only just left off touching. "Pity then because the name's Harry. Just plain Harry"

"I like plain Harry well enough. It suits you. Shall I call you Harry, then?"

"Don't even think about it." He rolled over and then atop her, trapping her beneath him. "You asked me to tell you something personal, and I have. To my way of thinking, I must have some sort of reward coming my way for baring my blackguard's soul." His hands found her wrists, and he lifted her arms above her head. Her heartbeat quickened, and the heat between her thighs began to build.

She looked up into his eyes, intent on her face, and said, "But I've already bared my soul to you, haven't I?"

He glanced down to the sheet she'd pulled over herself. "Indeed, and a beautiful soul it is, I'm sure, but I'd much rather you bared those magnificent breasts instead."

Now it was his turn to spoil the moment. She turned her head, swallowing against the thickness in her throat.

He let her loose and then lifted her chin on the edge of his hand so that she was looking up at him. "I suppose you think that, like your oaf of a fiance, your breasts are all any man sees when he looks at you?" When she let silence answer for her, he said, "Yes, your breasts are very beautiful, but then so is all the rest of you."

She gave a soft snort. "Really Hadrian, I do own a mirror."

"I can see you want for convincing. Very well, then, sometimes I lie abed at night and think of you lying in yours. What you might be wearing, what you really look like beneath all those layers of clothes. If the rest of you is as creamy and soft as your throat looks to be, how much the delectable fullness of your bottom owes to a bustle, and yes, how lovely your breasts must be--to touch, to kiss, to suckle."

"Hadrian, I--"

"Don't want to hear it, any of it, I know. You see, you've just asked me to tell you something personal, something intimate, and now you're doing your level best to shut those pretty ears of yours because you don't fancy what you hear. Well, too bloody bad, Callie, because if I have to pay with my honesty, then so do you."

She lifted her chin, trying to look braver than she felt. "Very well, what do you want me to say?"

"That you've thought of me in the same way. That you've lain in your chaste little spinster's bed and spread those lovely long legs of yours and fucked yourself with your fingers and pretended it's me you're feeling--my lips, my tongue, my cock."

"You're being deliberately vulgar." She tried to sound strident but there was no honesty in it, no point in pretending. What he's said was exactly what she had been thinking,
doing
all these past weeks.

"Undoubtedly, but what I'm also being is honest." He slid a hand between her thighs, slipped a finger deep inside her. "Confession time, Callie, can you give as good as you get?"

Without looking down, she could feel how wet she was, how hot, how ready for whatever it was he might be moved to give. His finger inside her started to slide in and out, back and forth. Her mouth opened on a moan. "W-what is it you want me to say?"

He stilled his hand, calculated torture. "I want you to tell me all the things you think of doing with me, of me doing to you, of our doing together. I want you to touch yourself as you do when you're alone; only this time you won't be alone, Callie. I'll be here, watching you pleasure yourself, watching your face when you cry out my name and come."

"Nothing is so burdensome as a secret."

--French proverb

D
awn lights were streaking the winter sky when Callie crept into the house on Half Moon Street, draped her rumpled gown over the back of a chair, and slipped beneath the chilly sheets of her own empty bed. She felt tired as well as deliciously tender in spots she could scarcely name but what she mostly felt was wonderful, wonderful beyond words. For the first time in her life, she'd made love, truly made love, and the potency of that act was beyond her wildest imaginings.