Regency Society Collection Part 1. Sarah Mallory
and to the rounded shape of her hips, skirting the outline, making her know in his exploration how truly beautiful she was. Not just a whore. Not just a night or a coin. No contract in any of it save desire.
Her lips parted and her breathing quickened as his touch moved back to her centre and then away at the very last moment so that he did not quite fulfil her hidden want. But he felt it. Felt it in the way her skin rose against his hand, swollen with need.
Sweat beaded her upper lip and her forehead where her fringe had fallen. He knew that heat, too, in the place beneath his cheek as he bent to the juncture of her thighs.
This time she did shout out, shock resonating as his tongue reached in, tasting the fine wine of woman, and her hands threaded in his hair like an anchor, keeping him caught, as the flame does the moth.
The fire of youth and sex and passion. The lust of a hundred days of abstinence and many years of caution. The memory of what it was like once to only feel free. He drank like a man newly come from the desert until all that was left was her.
Her skin. Her smell. The feel of her fingers in his hair, holding him closer.
‘Jeanne.’ He moved back as he said her name and when no flicker of recognition passed into her summer-blue eyes he knew even that was a lie.
Still, he could not care. She was here and he was here and her blood on his sheets more real than any falsehood could ever be.
He moulded the swell of her breast into the palm of his hand and lifted the softness. Full fat abundance fell across the space between his first finger and his thumb. No little girl here. Her chest rose, fast and then faster.
Bringing her face to his, he opened her mouth to a kiss, surprising himself by the want, and when her resistance faltered all he knew was bliss. Her tongue, her cheeks, her face in his hands turning to him, the pull of knowledge, the sharp tang of certainty, the urge to own and keep and possess.
When he unlaced his breeches and lifted her onto his lap she did not fight him, and when she felt the tip of his sex pause for a second before pressing inwards, she welcomed the deep ache of it as her head lolled upon his shoulder. Submitting. Yielding. Nothing essential save the heavy rigidness of his manhood felt in the core of her body.
‘Ahh, sweetheart,’ he said, dampness on his forehead as her breasts fell heavy between them. Eleanor revelled in his expertise, in his finesse, in the way he built her hunger along with his own ‘til there was nowhere for either of them to go. Except up and away into the realms of fantasy and delight, and the sheer relief of orgasm.
He held her afterwards this time, against his chest, stroking her back with his fingers as the noises of the traffic outside became louder. His shirt of the finest linen was damp in sweat and she wondered why he had not discarded it, the smell of musk and man embedded in the fabric. Perhaps it was because of the scars she had felt raised upon his back when her fingers had lingered there?
Caught in a world with no one else near, she became braver and leant over to trace her tongue around the shape of his ear exactly as he had done to hers.
His breath simply stopped and the scent between them was pungent and insistent, another binding that held them, another sense fuelled by wonderment.
Cristo let her take him this time, his control slipping into an unfamiliar acquiescence. He liked the way she held him tentatively, with the palm of one hand splayed against his chest and the hard length of his manhood pressing deep into her stomach.
When the other fingers curled around his shaft he tensed and she pulled away, until his fingers again found hers and returned them, the pure uncertainty leaving him breathless.
He wanted to move, wanted to topple her beneath him, but she held him with her fingers, her breasts grazing his chest and the length of her false hair tying him to immobility.
‘God, help me.’ His voice sounded nothing like it usually did and this time he spoke in English, a sure sign of just how far his restraint had slipped. Turning, his body covered hers, heavy and true, as he drove in hard because there was no moderation left in him, no restraint or inhibition. The shuddering finality of his release brought him a liberation he had long thought of as past.
‘God.’ His voice was not kind as he slipped from her a good twenty minutes later and crossed the room to the privacy of his bath chamber, the oath repeated again as he comprended the full enormity of what had just happened. Beraud’s purchased whore was making him care again, feel again, hope again.
Laying his forehead against the cool silver mirror, he closed his eyes. The girl was dangerous with her alabaster skin and her elemental sensuality. In his world, anything of value was a way of losing control, the weakness of concern an easy weapon for those who would want to harm him. And there were so many who did!
He needed to have her gone before others sensed an attachment and used her innocence as a pawn, needed to protect her in the only way that he still could.
Pulling on his breeches and finding another shirt, he walked back into the room, the anger marking his movements with haste.
Eleanor could barely understand all that had just happened.
Now he looked angry, unemotional, a different shirt buttoned full around his neck. No longer biddable. His hair was tied tightly into a queue and slid down the silk on his shoulders, an overlord of the dark underbelly of Paris, the four fingers still left on his right hand all bejewelled.
A stranger, only that, no vestige left of the lost hours shared between them. No remnant of a softer man who might truly cherish her. Just danger and hazard and difference, and a choice of life that showed in the hard lines of his body and face.
Eighteen and set apart from everything now, a fallen woman, a stupid woman, a woman who would never again quite fit in to the strictly governed world of her upbringing. Spoiled goods. What husband should want her?
Her breath came quick and shallow as she fought back the pooling tears!
She was going to cry now, he could see that in the way she tipped her head down and dropped her shoulders. A girl who had made a choice she regretted, her deep red lipstick smudged across her mouth like a wound.
‘Where are your clothes?’ He made no effort at all to moderate his voice.
‘Downstairs in a b-b-blue chamber, but my gown was badly torn.’ Fright had made her shake, the cover she was draped in shivering with some force. Excusing himself for a moment he unfastened the slats on the door and asked a servant to find her attire.
Then, moving to his wardrobe, he found a woollen jacket and a satin skirt that some woman had left here a few months back. ‘Put these on for now.’
She reached out for them and he added a scarf of fine wool from the many lined up at the back of his closet, noticing the feminine way she fashioned it around her neck. Her long wig was caught up in the heaviness of the layers and he saw darker locks below. All a ruse?
Interest sharpened. ‘How well do you know Beraud?’
‘He is one of my aunt’s clients.’
‘Then if you know what is good for you, ma chérie, you will stay away from him. His tastes run to the more eclectic …’ He tapered off, tired of trying to warn her, tired of taking responsibility for a whore who knew exactly what it was she was doing.
He could not save them all. He had learned that truth years ago when the first woman to plead for assistance had spent his gold on a bottle of the finest cognac and thrown herself off the bridge of the Pont d’Alma. Her body had been dragged up with his engraved watch in her hands and the weight of the law had descended, demanding answers that brought him notice he was far from wanting. Since then he had been much more careful.
He looked away