Iron Hard (2 page)

Turning away abruptly, she faced the desk and lifted the lid on the delivery box with unsteady hands. The lovebirds glimmered in the firelight, their tin feathers flexing as they moved closer to each other. “I hope these are satisfactory, my lord.”

He came up behind her, his greater height enabling him to look over her shoulder. He stood so close she could smell him: warm, virile male with the faintest touch of clove and bergamot.

“My god,” he said gruffly, reaching around her to slide his hand beneath a bird and lift it out. “I have never seen the like.”

Annie’s stomach quivered with delight at his praise. The way the baron hefted the small creature—curling his palm around it and testing its weight—incited scorching thoughts of his hand on her breasts, cupping them from his position behind her, admiring her form with equal warmth.

“Do not remove them too far from one another,” she warned. Her voice softened with the memory of another pair of birds, a gift from a man she’d once thought to spend her life with. “They cannot be parted, if you don’t wish them broken.”

“Broken.” His warm breath blew across the shell of her ear. “Is that not true of us all? Once we find the other half of ourselves, we are never again whole without them.”

“Yes.” Her gaze remained riveted on his hand, the warm live flesh carefully holding her delicate creation. “Will they be a gift? For your other half, perhaps?”

“They are for you, Annabelle,” he said softly. “To replace the ones you lost.”

“My lord?” Her chest lifted and fell in an elevated rhythm. She wondered if he knew how the soft hum of his turning gears affected her. The low sound coursed over her senses in a constant tingling stream.

“Gaspard Vangess served under me. He spoke of you. As beautifully as you create things with your hands, he created you in words.” There was the veriest hint of his lips against her ear. “Before I saw you in truth, I dreamed of you. Wanted you.”

With shaking hands, she took the bird from him and set it carefully back in the box. Its partner cooed and shifted closer.

“Have I frightened you?” he asked hoarsely. “I meant to woo you carefully. That remains my intent. I apologize that I wasn’t prepared for your effect on me. The moment you entered the room, I was ensnared. But I won’t press you beyond your allowance.”

“I’m not frightened.” She exhaled in a rush. “He is gone, then?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. Felt it.” But she also felt a quiet, painful relief to know her first love’s fate for a certainty. Not knowing had become the most painful aspect of all.

“His last words were of you. He secured my promise to replace the birds he’d once given you, the ones you lost during the London invasion. He went to war to make the world a safe place for you to have precious and fragile things, and he wanted to see that goal met and come full circle. I chose to present you with a gift that won’t die. I cannot replace Vangess, but I can give you something of him that will never leave you.”

A tear slipped free, along with an aching weight she hadn’t realized she was carrying. “My poor, sweet Gaspard.”

The baron stood at military rest behind her, a stoic yet soothing presence. “My heart aches for your loss.”

“Thank you.” Annie watched the small parrots nuzzle against each other. She was powerfully aware of her desire to do the same with the man behind her. A man with whom she felt an undeniable affinity and appreciation. “I am no longer the girl he told you about.”

“No. That girl was his. Annie, he called you. But I think Bella better suits the lush and courageous woman you’ve become.”

And the woman she’d become was suddenly unencumbered. And so very lonely. She watched the lovebirds and envied their bond. “For a time, I was broken.”

He touched the top button of her jacket where it lay against her nape. “And now?”

“Now… I am whole but empty.” And mantled by a man who stirred her blood while desiring her in return. An unexpected yet welcome miracle.

“What you would have of me? You have only to ask.”

Her head fell forward, her eyes drifting closed. “I want you to touch me, my lord. I want to be the Bella you see when you look at me. I want to be filled again.”

THE BARON NUZZLED AGAINST ANNIE’S upswept hair. The first of her coat’s buttons was urged free of its hole. The rest swiftly followed, coaxed into surrender—as she was herself—by the baron’s agile and dexterous mechanical hand. When he pushed the garment forward, over her shoulders and down her arms, she reveled in the rush of air that cooled her fevered skin.

“I must tell you,” she whispered. “My brother, Thomas, aspires to work for you.”

“I will train him myself.”

The largesse of his quick offer and the joy it would bring to Thomas softened her heart. “That isn’t why I want you.”

“I wouldn’t care if it was.”

Annie glanced over her shoulder, her heartbeat faltering at his beauty. “Why not?”

He brushed the backs of his fingers across her cheek. “Clearly a man with my embellishments would benefit considerably by an association with an engineer of your skill, but that does not mitigate the fact that it’s the living parts of me that need you most. Requiring each other for more than sex is a blessing, Bella, not a curse.”

She lifted her arms over her head, wrapping them around his neck and pulling his mouth down to hers. His kiss curled her toes. Lush and deep, he took her mouth with a fierce possessiveness. He ate at her, licking and suckling in a manner that had her writhing against him, seeking the kind of closeness that required bared skin.

The remainder of her clothes were swiftly shed—her shirt and skirt, pantalettes and stockings. When he freed the stays of her corset with a hiss of compressed air, she sighed along with the sound, her inhibitions stripped away with her attire. Not that she’d had all that many by the time he touched her. The baron had been seducing her from the moment he commissioned the lovebirds. The journey to this point, both mental and actual, had only lured her deeper under his spell.

“Annabelle.” He cupped her breasts through her chemise, lifting their moderate weight and kneading gently, just as she’d imagined mere moments before. He rolled her nipples between thumb and forefinger, and her head fell back against his shoulder, her lips parting on rapid breaths. Both of his hands were warm, his touch both reverent and rapacious. Her nerve endings woke from their extended dormancy, prickling with near-painful intensity. She grew slick and hot between her legs, her sex throbbing with greedy hunger.

Her fingers slid through the long, thick strands of his hair to reach his nape. She stroked him there, shivering when he groaned. Her hips began to rock in small circles, deliberately massaging his cock with her derriere. “My lord…”

The baron nipped her ear with his teeth and clutched her possessively between her thighs. “Raphael,” he corrected. “I want to hear you say it.”

His lips moved across her nape, caressing, goading without words. Her heartbeat stuttered.

“Raphael.”
Clutching fistfuls of courage along with her chemise, Annie pulled the garment’s hem to her waist, the material sliding between his gentle grip and her tender flesh.

He parted the lips of her sex with scissoring fingers. “I’m going to put my mouth here and lick you. Make you come.”

Annie sagged against him, slicking his artificial hand with the liquid proof of her desire.

The use of that hand told her that he knew her. Understood her. There were few who collected her appreciation for mechanization. Even Thomas wondered at her fascination with well-oiled and effortlessly moving parts. He didn’t comprehend the thrill she felt, the rush of excitement and pleasure. She wasn’t certain she understood it, but there was no denying her attraction to the baron. All of him. The parts pulsing and breathing with life, and the metallic ones having those very effects on her.

“I want my mouth on you, too,” she confessed. She would start at his lips and work her way down his arm, sucking each copper finger before performing the same service to his cock.

“It will be.” Raphael caught her by the waist and lifted her, eliciting a soft cry of surprise. He carried her to the damask-covered settee and arranged her on her back, sinking to his knees on the floor beside her. Gooseflesh raced across her skin. One of her legs was lifted and draped over his muscular shoulder, then his head lowered to the glistening flesh between her thighs.

The first teasing lick made her arch upward with heated lust. Sweat misted skin that felt too tight and hot. “I am too fast with you,” she gasped.

“Am I not equally so with you?”

“You are a man.”

“I promise to make you happy about that.”

Annie laughed, then caught her breath, her stomach concaving as he covered her with his mouth.
“Yes.”

Her moan echoed through the cavernous room, her fingers pushing into the silky curtain of his hair. He tongued her gently, the pointed tip stroking feather light over her distended clitoris. Pleasure coiled like a compressed spring. Too swiftly. “Raphael. Please.”

“Not yet.” Lips curving against her, he angled his head and speared his tongue into her quivering sex.

Beyond shyness or shame, she tightened her leg over his shoulder, tugging him closer. Raphael obliged with a growl, fucking her aching flesh with quick fierce stabs. She rocked into his working mouth, circling her hips without thought or reason. Effortlessly, he lifted her, balancing her with one hand as he pushed two unyielding copper fingers inside her.

Fingers that
vibrated
.

Annie jerked in startled delight. The slightly ribbed texture of the flexing joint meshing sent tremors through her limbs. She sobbed as the vibration increased, beading her nipples into painfully hard points. He began to thrust, his fingers pumping through her spasming tissues with tender purpose. Determined. Expert. Knowing just the spot to rub with those wickedly pulsating fingertips. All the while he sucked her clitoris, tugging and worrying the sensitive point with frenzied flicks of his tongue.

She gasped his name as she shuddered into an orgasm so powerful it blackened her vision. Violent trembling wracked her body and she clung to the edge of the settee, seeking an anchor as reality fell away.

The baron lowered her gently to the cushion, his wet mouth nuzzling against her inner thigh before he withdrew from her and pushed to his feet with powerful grace. He undressed swiftly and unabashedly, his abdomen lacing tightly as he dispensed with his boots, a task impossible for most men without the aid of a valet. Flushed with lust, lips wet and swollen from the attention he’d paid to her, the baron’s gaze slid over her like a tangible caress: soft, yet resolute; his mind clearly occupied with all the ways he wanted her and how he would have her.

It was a novel and highly exciting perusal for her. Gaspard had been nearly as untried as she had been, their love having grown from adolescence. Raphael was mature and delectably well-practiced.

He set one knee on the cushion between her sprawled legs and stabilized himself with one hand around the wooden lip of the seatback. “What are you thinking?”

She realized then how exposed she was, how immodest and unguarded. “What have you done to me?”

He cupped her cheek with his free hand. “No more than you have done to me. This arm you admire is not the one given to me on the battlefield. Such craftsmanship could not be found in that hell. The grafting of the first, crude replacement was excruciating. Death would have been a kindness and there were days when I prayed for it. Gaspard Vangess—awash in needless guilt that I had shielded him from the blast that took my arm—would sit with me and distract me with tales of you. He regaled me with stories of a rambunctious girl with freckles on her nose and mischief in her blue eyes. Mindless with agony and laudanum, my mind took possession of the memories he shared. For a time in my delirium, you were mine and I loved you beyond all reason. It was for you that I recovered, only to realize you were a dream that belonged to another man, a promising airman who was killed a fortnight before I returned to the fleet.”

“Raphael—” She cupped his hip in her palm.

His breath hissed out. He mounted her, his patience seemingly at an end. The thick head of his cock tucked into the slick and swollen entrance to her body. She held her breath, waiting.

“Please,” she whispered. At his first slow push, her head fell back.

“Christ.” His luxurious hair brushed her cheek. “Your cunt is tight and hot. So wet. Perfect.”

Catching her leg behind the knee, he anchored it on his hip, opening her wider. He withdrew slightly, then returned in a practiced roll of his hips.

Her nails dug into his clenching buttocks. “Faster,” she urged in a voice so hoarse she scarcely knew it.

He laughed, and the arrogant maleness inherent in the sound spurred her further. She threw her hips upward, taking more of him.

“Vixen.” Raphael kissed her even as he pinned her to the settee with a firm but gentle grip on her hip. “I won’t allow you to rush me.”

Her fingers kneaded restlessly into the hard muscles of his back. “You cannot command me as you would your crew.”

“No?”

“You said you would fill me, not tease me to madness!”

All levity fled his breathtakingly handsome features. He pulled back, then pushed deeper, exhaling in a rush when she tightened greedily around him. He was hot to the touch, his skin slick with sweat, his muscles rigid. But he would not be spurred into rutting atop her as she wished. “I want something from you in return, Bella.”

Wrapping both legs around him, she tried to draw him closer. “What more can I give you?”

“This,” he purred, working his thick cock inexorably deeper. “Your passion, your need. I want to be the one you hunger for, the one who shares your bed. The only one, from this day ‘til my last.”

Even in the extremity of her lust, her mind raced with the impossibility of their mutual infatuation. And yet… something more profound was between them as well.

“You know,” he went on, altering the angle of her hips to slide farther into her, “as I’ve known, that we are what the other needs or you would not be arching beneath me now.”

Dear god, she wanted the baron with a primitive hunger. She wanted him as she knew him to be: Bold. Dauntless. A force of tremendous will. What an adventure it would be to become the mistress of such a man… “Yes, I know.”

He stilled, staring down at her with those gloriously dissimilar eyes; one as brilliant as an emerald, the other like polished silver. “But I cannot be a kept man.”

She blinked up at him. “Beg your pardon?”

His mouth curved with wicked amusement. “Young men emulate me. I have a reputation to uphold. You must make an honest man of me.”

“Raphael.” Her chest tightened painfully. With hope. With fear. With lingering grief. “I—”

With an exaggerated sigh, he straightened his arms and began to withdraw. When she realized he intended to cease their bedsport completely, she narrowed her gaze. Two could play.

Tightening her legs around him, she caught his shoulders and wrenched to the side, rolling them both to the floor.

The drop was short, mere inches. He landed on his back.
Laughing.
Jaw set with determination, she reached between them to position the cock that was as impressive as the man himself, then sheathed him in her body with a swift plunge of her hips.

A soft cry escaped her. His mirth fled with a serrated groan. She set her hands palms down on his chest and gave a tentative swivel of her hips, easing the pressing fullness of his deep penetration.

“I’m conquered,” he said hoarsely. “My surrender is unconditional and absolute.”

“But I’ve yet to state my terms.”

“I concede to them all.”

Her brow arched even as she rose up on her knees, stroking her eager sex with the length of his throbbing erection. The sensation was exquisite, as was he, this legendary man who awakened a stirring emotion she’d thought forever lost to her. “Where is the strategy in that, Captain?”

Raphael caught her hips and surged upward, filling her. “One must lay claim to a territory before one can cultivate it.”

Clutching his wrists for balance, Annie began to move in earnest. Her spine arched with heated pleasure as he worked with her, lifting his lean hips to meet her downward drives. Beneath the onslaught of sensation, her body moved as a thing separate from her mind, the need to ride his pumping cock too potent for moderation. An approaching orgasm drummed through her blood, coaxing wrenching cries from her with every desperate thrust.

He pushed the low table aside with a powerful sweep of his arm, then rolled her beneath him. Fisting the thick Aubusson rug in his mechanical hand, he anchored her by the shoulder and pounded his lust into her with heavy, rhythmic lunges. Her legs fell open, inviting him deeper, her neck arching with the brutal rush of desire.

“Bella,” he growled, an instant before he jerked inside her. The first hard pulse of semen made her gasp, spurring the climax that joined with his. She tightened around his spending cock, milking his seed with rippling spasms. He groaned with every clinging grasp, circling his hips to hit the end of her.

Her arms encircled him as he lowered his chest to hers, his back slick with sweat and his muscles quivering like a stallion run hard and long. Her eyes closed on a shuddering sigh. She contemplated possessing such a lavishly splendid creature as the baron and being possessed by him in return. The endeavor, when committed to so early in their association, was not without tremendous risk. But the rewards… Already she felt like a butterfly newly emerged from its cocoon.