Enslaved (18 page)

“I was heavily drugged before I ever left the club. I might as well have drunk a pint of scotch whiskey. On second thought, I may have done that, too.” He sent her the lopsided grin of which she was growing entirely too fond.

She assumed he meant to revisit their argument over the letter. Tensing, she said, “You would have been in a great deal of pain otherwise.”

He didn’t debate the point. Instead, he said, “You’re a very good nurse. I’m sure Dr. Pritchard couldn’t have had a better helper had he called in a professional.”

“Thank you.” Seeing he wanted to talk, she set the script aside. “In theater companies this sort of accident happens more often than you might think.”

“Really? I suppose I always assumed sword play was just that, play.”

He’d been making a great many assumptions lately, including that the passion and tenderness Daisy had shown him must mean she was as head-over-heels in love as he was. Clearly, that wasn’t the case. And yet visceral instinct told him what they shared was real, that she cared for him even if that caring fell short of love. Should he cast that gift away because it didn’t come with the fairytale ending he expected?

She shook her head. “Safeties come off sword tips all the time and even when one fights with prop weapons made of wood, much damage can be done if one isn’t careful.”

Looking into her lovely, fine-boned face, Gavin realized he wasn’t ready to give up on her, not quite yet. He had another full week to change her mind and much might yet happen in that time. This Freddie of hers must be in Paris still. Why else would she bother with sending him a letter? Gavin reasoned he had two powerful advantages over his rival, proximity and history. He was here with Daisy in his London flat and though he certainly hadn’t planned it thus, he suspected his injury meant they’d be spending even more time together. They spent a full year of their respective childhoods living in each other’s pockets at Roxbury House, spending nearly every waking moment together. If that experience didn’t serve as a foundation for a future, he couldn’t say what would.

He shifted position to reach for the glass of water on the table beside his bed, wincing when the pain in his shoulder flared to life. All concern, Daisy shot up from her chair. Handing him the glass, she said, “Whatever needs fetching, I can do for you. Does your shoulder hurt you very badly?”

He shook his head. “Pain takes many forms. A nick in the shoulder is in no way the worst sort.”

Leaning across the bed, she took his hand in hers. “Oh, Gavin, the very last thing I ever wanted to do is hurt you. Perhaps I shouldn’t stay out the month. According to Dr. Pritchard, you’ll be up and about in another day or so.”

Touched by her tenderness, Gavin lifted her chin on the edge of his other hand, bringing her face up so their gazes met. “I want you to stay. We’ve another week by my reckoning, and I don’t want to waste another single second of it.”

Emerald eyes peered into his. “Are you sure?”

He nodded his head. “Yes.” He hesitated and then added, “There’s something else I’m quite sure of, too.”

“What is that?”

“I very much want to make love to you.”

She regarded him with shocked eyes. “But, Gavin, you’re ill.”

“And filthy, I know. You could bathe me first.” He shot her a wink.

She hesitated. Eyes going from emerald to smoky green, she shook her head. “Later, not just yet. I think I fancy you a bit dirty for a change. When Rourke brought you in last night, your shirt was soaked through with sweat and fragrant with musk.” She leaned in and slid her tongue down the side of his neck. “Hmm, salty.”

He was coming to appreciate her sensual nature. He smiled back at her. “In that case, climb atop and make love with me, Daisy. Lift up your skirts and take me inside you and ride me as though it was the very last time, and the very last day on earth, for both of us.”

“Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you,
deserves as well a dark house and
a whip as madmen do …”
W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
, Rosalind,
As You Like It

T
hey spent their final week more in bed than out of it and not because Gavin was ill. Dr. Pritchard’s prognosis of a speedy recovery was borne out. The next day Gavin was up and about and the day after that he insisted on going into the office for part of the day. Though the wound still pained him, the discomfort wasn’t great enough to warrant touching the laudanum the doctor had left behind. Making love to Daisy and then falling asleep in her arms was a far better tonic than any drug. She was the consummate lover, the ultimate fantasy woman. She had no inhibitions, or so it seemed to Gavin, and within the rich inner world into which his common sense had retreated he told himself her lack of reserve must be a measure of how deeply she cared for him.

And she must care for him, otherwise how could she respond to him with such … exuberance? The little moans and sighs might be manufactured, but he doubted even an actress as talented as Daisy could produce at will the warm stickiness he felt on his fingers and on his member when he entered her or the sudden shiver of inner muscles when she climaxed around him.

But as the days slipped away, doubts began to chip away at his bliss. In his weaker moments, he knew a keen and poisonous jealousy, an irrational hatred of everyone and anyone she’d been with before him, Freddie especially. When one evening he came home from the Garrick to find her waiting for him dressed only in black stockings, garters, and one of his silk cravats loosely knotted about her bare throat, his first thought was, “She’s done this before for someone else.” When she slid down the length of him and took him inside her mouth and deep into her throat, bringing him to the brink of climax and then back again, prolonging his pleasure until he thought he’d either explode or pass out, later he couldn’t turn off his thoughts from wondering how many times she must have used that very same trick to pleasure other men. How else could she get it so completely, perfectly right?

For him nearly everything they did together was a marvel, a first, a minor miracle of sorts.

“I don’t deserve you,” she said one evening when they were alone in her room. She sat at her dressing table, brushing out her hair. ‘I’m not half good enough for you.”

His eyes met hers in the mirror. “That’s rubbish and you know it.”

“Do I?” She set the brush down and turned to look at him. “I’ve been with a lot of men, you know. Not legion but a good many. I suppose you would say a lot.”

There it was, out at last, the elephant in the room, the heretofore unspoken and unacknowledged barrier between them. “Why are you bringing this up now?”
Hypocrite!
As if her sexual history wasn’t the instrument of his self-torture, the uppermost topic in his mind.

She shrugged. “One of us needs to. You’ve been punishing me for weeks now. Why not make it official?” She held up a palm, cutting off his protest. “Don’t put yourself to the trouble of denying it. I’ve seen it in your eyes, a coldness that creeps in when you look at me after … after we’ve made love.”

He blew out a breath. It was late, coming on eleven o’clock. The weekly dinner with his grandfather had been the usual tense inquisition. He was in no mood. “I know what this is about. You’re worrying over your opening and now you’re overwrought, imagining things.” He didn’t know who he was working hardest to convince, her or himself.

She rose from the cushioned bench. “Am I, Gavin? You take me to your bed, you enjoy the things we do there, you enjoy them very much, but afterward you can’t keep from asking yourself how it is I came to be so bloody good at it. ‘She’s like a whore, my private whore,’ you think to yourself, and then you hate yourself for thinking that, but you hate me more because you know it’s more than half true.”

He shook his head, feeling drained. “What … what is it you want me to say?”

“Why not the truth? Yes, let’s have a good dose of that precious honesty you hold so dear.”

“Very well, I hate it that you’ve been with other men, be it one other man or legion. There, happy now?”

She folded her arms over her breasts. “And?”

She was goading him but suddenly Gavin was past caring. He stalked over to her. “Sometimes I lie awake at night and play a game with myself, do a reckoning in my mind. ‘She admits she’s been with
a lot
of men. What does she mean by a lot?’ I ask myself. Five? Ten? Dozens? I imagine you doing the same things you do with me to them. But by far the worst is when I imagine them touching you, making you moan and shift your hips and come just as you do for me, and it’s then that I think perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll go raving. Satisfied now you’ve made me say what you set out to hear?”

She shook her head. “No, Gavin, not satisfied. Relieved, perhaps. I’ll leave now, of course.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and hauled her up against his chest. “No, I don’t want you to go.”

“I’m not your prisoner, Gavin. You can’t keep me here against my will. If I stay, the anger and resentment will only fester and grow into something worse. You’ll end in hating me, hating us, and I don’t think I could bear that. Better I go while there’s still some beauty left to hold on to.”

“I don’t want memories, I want you.”

She settled her gaze on his. “Punish me then.”

“Sorry?”

“I said I want you to punish me. That way it will be over, done with, and we can both move on.”

He dropped his hands to his sides. The very thought of hitting her made him feel sick. “I would never strike you. I would never strike any woman, but least of all you.” He almost said “the woman I love” but stopped himself in time.

“For God’s sake, Gavin, I’m not asking you to bloody my nose. Only take me across your lap and … spank me.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Trust me, Gavin, you want to. Afterward we’ll both feel the better for it.”

“Somehow I doubt that very much.”

She turned, and after a moment’s pause he followed her to the bed. “Shall I sit on the edge, then? You’ve obviously more experience at this sort of thing than I, but then that’s hardly news.” The sharpness in his voice surprised him.

She winced, and it occurred to him that perhaps she was right. He’d been lashing out at her, punishing her with his words and his coldness for weeks now. Even when they made love, he was careful to hold a part of himself back. At least this, distasteful as it was to him, would be honest.

“You should sit wherever you like, if you like. If you’d prefer it, I could just bend over.”

“No, no, if we’re to do it, then let’s do it properly. I’ll sit,” he answered, telling himself he was only humoring her.

He sat on the side of the bed and waited, his gaze following her as she moved about the room. She had been undressing when he’d come in earlier. She wore her black silk robe and her corset beneath. It occurred to him she’d probably already slipped off her knickers, and he felt himself harden.

“We were rehearsing earlier,” she called over her shoulder in the process of checking the contents of a dresser drawer. “One of the props is a paddle. That should serve nicely, I think.”

He looked at her, horrified. How desperate she must be for forgiveness, absolution, peace. “The flat of my hand is as far as I’m willing to go. Take it or leave it.”

Without speaking, she walked over to him and climbed onto his lap, then arranged herself so she was stretched out face down across his thighs, and against his will he felt his cock coming to life. “You wanted to know how many men I’ve been with before you. Ask me now.”

Distracted, he drew his gaze away from her buttocks pointing upward. “Sorry?”

She turned her head to the side and looked back at him. “If you ask me now, I’ll have to tell you, won’t I?”

Ah, now he saw how this game was to be played—one strike meted out for each transgression, measured violence to erase salacious sin, forgiveness purchased with pain.

“Very well, how many?”

Silence. Was she goading him?

“Five?” he suggested, aware his heartbeats had quickened.

“No, not five.” Her coy tone grated on him. She might be lying prone beneath him and yet, once again, she was the one in control.

“Very well, then, more?”

He landed his hand on her bottom, a carefully controlled smack. She wasn’t wearing panties, which of course meant she had staged this in advance just as she staged each and every intimate moment between them. She was playing another of her damned roles, playing him, and he felt a surge of raw anger even as she must feel his penis hardening beneath her.

“Is it ten, then?” His hand came down, this time hard enough for the sting to penetrate the silk of her robe. It felt good, he realized, but not quite good enough.

He threw up the robe, bunching the back of it in his hand. Firm, moon-pale buttocks stared back at him as if begging to be on the receiving end of his hand.

She flinched. “No.”

“No more or no fewer?” He waited, hand raised.

“Fewer … I think.”

“You
think?
“ Could it be that taking a man into her body was of such little consequence she hadn’t bothered to keep count? If so, then damn her, damn them both.

And then Gavin did what before he’d done only in his deepest, darkest fantasies. He cracked his palm down onto her left buttock and the aftershock quivered up to his elbow.

“Ouch!” She squirmed in his lap. Hands on the mattress, she tried to push herself up and off, but he would have none of it. The friction, along with the sounds of her quickened breathing and the rosy bloom of his handprint were having an unexpected, powerful effect. Later he would feel guilt if not outright self-loathing, but what he felt at the moment was fully, powerfully aroused.

He brought his hand down once, twice, thrice in rapid succession, savoring the sound of flesh slapping, the residual sting singing across his palm.

“Eight,” she gasped, bracing herself on her elbows and arching her back. “It was eight. Nine, counting you.”

He heard the catch in her voice and this time when he brought his hand down, it landed lightly, almost a pat. “So I count, do I?”

She twisted her head around to look at him, eyes tear-bright. “You know you do.”

“Then tell me so. Tell me I count, that I matter, and say it as though you mean it.”

“I do … I do mean it. You’ve always mattered to me, Gavin, and you always will. You’re my best friend in the world and … and so much more.”

At her admission, Gavin felt his own breathing calming, his heart settling to a more placid rhythm. He smoothed a palm over her bottom, rosy red and hot with his handprints. He’d marked her, but it was he who was marked, branded, forever changed.

He pulled down her robe and lifted her to sit upright in his lap. Cradling her in the crook of his arm, he pressed his lips to her damp forehead. “Say it again, once more, so I can look into your eyes and know you mean it.”

She reached for him, trembling fingers trailing the side of his face. “I’ve never had a lover who’s meant half as much to me as you do.”

“You might have just told me rather than put us both through …
this.”

She cast him a skeptical look. “Would you have believed me?”

He hesitated and then shook his head. Against all odds, he found himself smiling. “No, I suppose not. In that case, stay with me, not only to see the week out but for always.”

“I can’t.” She looked up at him, tears clumping her lashes.

Gavin swallowed hard. How he would bear letting her go again he couldn’t begin to say. “Then be with me now.” Gently, very gently, he lifted her off his lap and laid her down upon the bed.

Daisy had contrived the spanking scenario not because she was fond of pain but because she’d seen enough of the shadow side of human nature to know a physical remedy was the surest way to force Gavin to confront his conflicted feelings. What she hadn’t counted on was her own powerful reaction. The episode had released something deep inside her, freeing her from guilt, freeing her to feel, really
feel,
for the first time in years. After years of living in a state of self-imposed numbness, the rush of emotion was a heady release.

“Let me love you, Daisy.” Straddling her, Gavin looked up from kissing her between her tented legs.

She shifted her hips, the sheets a cool balm to her stinging bottom, the contrast between it and the wet silk of his tongue laving her labia almost more pleasure than she could bear. And then he surprised her with a light, purposive flick over just the right spot, sending her spiraling over the edge. She cried out her pleasure and instead of stopping he tongued her more.

She raised herself up on her elbows, her higher purpose drowned by the rush of physical sensation. “Gavin, please, no more. I can’t bear it.”

He stared up at her, eyes unrelenting, jaw set. “Oh, there’s going to be more, Daisy, a great deal more whether you want it or not.”

He flipped her over onto her stomach. There were no welts as there would have been had he used a cane or birch rod, just a great deal of warm, pink flesh.