A Lady Awakened (33 page)

“You needn’t seduce me with compliments, you know.” She was smiling, eyes still closed. “I’ve already given my consent.”

“Consent doesn’t preclude seduction. What a lot you have to learn.” He worked his fingers in at her hair’s roots, massaging her scalp. “Shall I teach you something new today?”

“Yes.” Susceptible girl. What wouldn’t she agree to, with his hands in her hair?

“I advise you to ask what I intend before agreeing to it. Or at least to stipulate a few things you will not do.”

“I don’t have to.” Her eyes opened, their irises like fresh-turned earth, and found his in the mirror. “I trust you, Mirkwood.” And no woman, ever, would say any words more thrilling to him than those.

A
S THOUGH
he had all the time in the world—perhaps he did—Mr. Mirkwood drew his hands from the roots of her hair to its ends, letting the locks fall in shiver-inducing caresses against her neck. Then he walked deliberately away from her and sat down in the armchair.

He would ask her to do something. She would say
yes
. He might like to command her, and she might say yes to that too.

His head slanted a bit to one side, considering her as he would a courtesan hired for his entertainment. He sank back in the chair, his hands light on its armrests. One finger drummed speculatively. “Take off your stockings,” he said.

Yes
. She bent forward and felt for the first garter.

“Not like that.” His voice floated, soft and dusky, across the room to where she sat. “Turn profile to me. Lift your foot up before you. Ease the stocking down slowly, and look at me while you do it.”

Like a courtesan, indeed. She turned profile. “Your wife will never be bored.”

“Don’t mention my wife. You’ll make me feel unfaithful.”

“Unfaithful to a wife with whom you’re not yet acquainted?” The garter, untied, fell loose about her thigh and she pushed her stocking down.

“Unfaithful to you both. A little slower, if you please.”

She crept the stocking down her calf while he watched, a lascivious smile playing on his lips. Doubtless he’d enacted this same scene with more women than he could count—but she wouldn’t think of that. The stocking slithered over her toes and off. She folded it loosely and tossed it to him.

His grin spread into something wolfish. “I knew you’d be good at this. Now the second one, please.”

He confounded her from the inside out, directing her in lewdness and peppering the commands with
please
. One couldn’t be sure, moment to moment, of who exactly was in charge.

“Throw me that one too.” He snatched the second stocking out of the air one-handed. Then he got up and went to the bed, where he laid both stockings across a pillow.

For the first time her pulse quickened. He might have things in mind to which she would not be equal. “What do you intend to do with those?” She folded her arms across her chest.

“I? Nothing.” He turned and faced her, already busy with his cravat. His eyes shone dark and shameless. “You, however, will use them to tie my wrists to the headboard before having your way with me.”

For an instant she felt as though someone had flipped her skin raw side out: she was one furious blush head to toe. Did men really … And how was she to … No. No. This was not a thing she cared to do. She rose to her feet, arms clamped about her ribs in the posture of intransigence. “You must have me confused with some more adventurous lady.”

“I don’t think so.” The cravat fell unheeded to the floor. “Consider a moment, darling.” He tugged his shirt free of his trousers. “I won’t be able to do anything you don’t approve, will I?” The shirt went over his head. “I’ll be entirely in your power.”

Curse his handsome shirtless self. He didn’t doubt for an instant she would comply. And curse her for having agreed to something new.

Refuse him. Tell him to suggest something else. He’ll understand
. But stubbornness rose up in strange moments these days, and now it had hold of her tongue. “That doesn’t sound very … diverting for you,” was all the demurral she could make.

“Oh, Mrs. Russell, you’d be surprised at what diverts me.” He’d sat down on the bed to pull off his boots. “Come here and let me show you how to make the knots.”

He showed her—one didn’t like to ask where he’d acquired the knowledge—the sequence of loops and twists round one carved mahogany spindle, and left her to tie the second while he shed his trousers. “Now,” he said, and she felt the mattress dip as he climbed onto the bed behind her, “you’ll do those same knots at my wrists. Not too tight. Not too loose.” With the grace of a prowling animal he crawled to the bed’s middle. He lowered his body to the sheets and turned over, arms snaking up above his head.

She looped the stockings one at a time round his wrists and knotted them. This was madness. For all that he was naked and bound, he didn’t look compliant in the least. His arm-muscles alone were a taunt to her puny soft hands. He lay before her like some creature of catastrophic power, something she ought to have thought twice about capturing. “Take off your chemise,” he said as soon as she’d secured him, and there was nothing of entreaty in his voice.

But her stockings held him fast. She need only obey if she wished to. Did she wish to? Yes. She stripped off the garment and dropped it to the floor.

“Good.” He drank in her nakedness, fervent as a man downing ale after three days in the desert. His eyes, gleaming with unholy intention, came to rest on hers. “Now fuck me.”

The command knocked her back like a handful of dust in the face. But only for a moment. He was the one tied up. She folded her arms again. “If you want my cooperation you had better address me more politely than that.”

“Fuck me.” Like the world’s wickedest elocution pupil he articulated the words, lips and tongue and teeth put to such nefarious use. “Fuck me until I thrash and shout beneath you.”

“It was shocking the first time. It’s not shocking now.”

“Fuck me like the whore I am.”

“That’s not shocking either.” Heaven help her, there was some pleasure in this. In resisting him so. “And I told you your role is closer to that of a stud animal.”

“Indulge me this once.” His whole body twisted and roiled, serpent-like. “Let me be your whore if I want to be.”

Let me
. “You mean that as a command, I suppose.” She loosened her arms and touched one finger to his near hip bone.

“Always. Use me, Martha.” His voice invited her into unspeakable things. “Ride me until you’ve got your seed, and then take your pleasure from my mouth.”

Well. Apparently not unspeakable, to him. And not, after all, too terribly distressing. The deeper he went into iniquity, the greater one’s reserves of mulish aplomb.

“You’re considering, aren’t you?” Hopeful to the last, Mr. Mirkwood. “You’re imagining how it would be. You’ve got me captive.” He flexed his hands to remind her. “You could keep me at it all afternoon if you liked. And grip onto the headboard for balance when the sensations grew too strong.”

“I’m
reconsidering
, in fact.” Without haste she trailed her finger over the hip bone, into the adjacent hollow and among his coarse curling hairs. “I don’t believe I would have agreed to restrain you, if I’d known you would take it as license to be so wicked.”

“Wicked, to be sure.” He repeated the word as though tasting it, his gaze now following her finger’s progress. “Perhaps you’d better punish me.”

Good Lord, what next? “Punish you, indeed.” She advanced her finger just to the base of his erection and stopped. “Suppose I were to walk out of this room and leave you here alone until you remembered your decency. Would that be punishment enough?”

He smiled as though he were teaching her chess and she’d just made a clever move. “Maybe.” His eyes came to her face, and wandered in leisurely, thorough fashion down her body and back to her still finger. “Or maybe you ought to touch yourself. Pleasure yourself, and force me to watch.”

“Now I know beyond question that you’ve confused me with someone else.” Aplomb had company: his every shameless utterance was waking strange—or not so strange—sensations that spiraled from her core on out. “And I doubt you’d take it as punishment, quite.”

“Darling, I would take it as
torture
.” Again he twisted against his bonds, so much power at her mercy. “Because you’d taunt me with it, wouldn’t you? You’d place yourself where I could nearly reach you. And you’d say things to inflame me, but never touch me at all. I’d have to lie here helpless, watching you give yourself what you won’t take from me.” He sucked in a breath. “Start now, if you would.”

What a dreadful man he was, all intemperate appetites and no decorum to speak of. And what foolish affection she felt for his libidinous excess. She skimmed her finger, and a second and a third, up the length of his appendage while he watched, eyes narrowing at the sensation. “No,” she said. Her hands went to the pillow at either side of his tied-back arms. She let him see her poised above him for a second or two. Then she bent her elbows and brought her mouth to his.

H
ELL AND
damnation. She’d never kissed him before. On the forehead, once. But never for pleasure—and whose pleasure was she about? No matter. No matter. Her lips brushed over his and he lay back to take it. Even without the use of his hands, he might have gained control of this kiss; might have led her through it as through a dance. Not today, though. Today he’d see where they went if she had the lead.

Her mouth was small on his. Her lips were careful and her breath was warm. His pleasure. Almost certainly. She went meticulously along his lower lip, giving attention to every fraction of an inch in light touches and delicate strokes. His mouth softened for her.
Invite. Don’t demand
. He let his lips part, just the width of a suggestion, and—like a sunbeam through London fog—felt the sweet trespass of her tongue.

A shiver surged through him. Her lips pulled taut as their corners ticked up. Her right hand left the pillow to feel its way to his nipple and torment him there.

Too much. He had to have his hands on her. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said against her mouth. “Untie me.”

She lifted her head enough to look into his eyes. Every inch the terrible uncloaked fairy, at last. “No,” she said, and bent to kiss him again.

Devil take her. She enjoyed this. She relished the spectacle of his thwarted desire. With one hand he scrabbled at the knots on the spindle. He’d free himself without her help, and then she’d see—

“No.” Her fingers closed about his wrist. “This was your idea. You’ve no one to blame but yourself.” She gazed down at him like a governess out of someone’s perverse boyhood fantasies, not to say his. “Perhaps next time you’ll think twice before proposing such sport.”

Good God. She was enjoying this indeed. She’d had to shift up to grasp his wrist and he could see now, not twelve inches from his mouth, where her nipples swayed, ripe and heavy as fruit ready for tasting. He could—no. Not yet. “Go on, then.” He let the words drift lazily through the air between them. “Do what you will to me.”

She let go his wrist. Her fingertips skated down the length of his arm to his shoulder, then slipped off to find purchase in the pillow. She knelt at his left side; now her left knee went up and over to straddle him. His breaths were shallow. His heart pummeled his chest like a sparring partner with a twenty-pound advantage. What was the matter with him? Breathless as a virgin bridegroom when he’d possessed this woman how many times?

Well, zero, to be exact. For all the times he’d spilled seed in her, he’d never yet possessed her. That was the matter.

Her eyes fixed to his, she felt down his belly with one hand and closed her fingers round the base of his cock. She held it steady and—thanks be to whatever divinity had put her in this mood today—eased herself down onto him, her soft parts yielding magnificently, embracing him with a warmth and wetness he’d once expected from a woman and would never, never take for granted again.

He breathed in. Breathed out. Held her steady gaze.

“You want me,” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said.

S
HE COULD
still say
no
. One could go partway down the path and pull up. Almost certainly she
would
do that, in fact, because without help from his fingers, no other outcome was likely. She took her hand from his appendage—his manhood—and put both palms to the mattress, feeling for the proper balance. This wasn’t … was it like this for him? Surely the fit didn’t feel so precarious when he was on top.

“Is something the matter?” Her eyes had left his, to watch her hands place themselves, but he apparently had nowhere else to look.

“It’s only … I don’t see how …” Assurance leaked away like air out of a balloon. A crude ungainly vision was coming clear, her naked body bouncing away atop his and losing the appendage more times than not. “The angles are all wrong.”

“Not wrong. Just different.” His voice was impossibly gentle, as though to stand in for the reassuring caress he could not deliver. His face, if one could bear to look at it, would probably radiate kind understanding. “Would you like me to close my eyes?”

Yes
. “No.” One did not give in to craven cowardice. And half his enjoyment was in seeing things; she would not take that away.

“I’d like to, just for a minute or so. For novelty.” Piece by piece, he burned through what was left of her resistance. He closed his eyes indeed, and the strong, patient lines of his face touched her resolve like a candle flame held to so much cheap paper.

She moved. She would show her gratitude by making a mission of his pleasure. The angle wasn’t so difficult, once one got accustomed. She might not look altogether ungainly. And he helped, thrusting up to meet her, showing her the pace and depth he liked best.

Use me
, he’d said. Her body took what it could from the long strokes of his manhood, and clamored for more. His mouth. His hands. His scalding gaze, at the very least. She took a breath. “Mirkwood. Open your eyes.”