“I am not a—” Clio began, then stopped herself. She could not say it.
Miles shook his head, disappointed. “For a moment I thought we were making progress. At any rate, you will do what I tell you from now on.”
Clio tilted her head up to study him. “Everyone always obeys you, don’t they?”
“If they are wise.”
Good God, he was pompous. There was a slight pause, and then Clio asked, “Is it very painful?”
Miles frowned. “What?”
“To be that way.”
“What way?”
“So insufferable. And conceited. I read in a book once that tyrants often die young because of the great effort it costs them to act so imperious. You look drained.”
It was not true. At that moment Miles looked more possessed than drained, but Clio decided not to quibble. Instead she rushed on. “Does it bother you awfully when people do not do what you say?”
“Not at all,” Miles told her through somewhat clenched teeth.
“Good. Because I intend to go out of my way to disobey you whenever the opportunity arises.”
“I fear you will have to find another hobby. Your opportunities will be few and far between when you are manacled to my bedpost.”
“You would not dare.”
“The temptation is strong. Very strong.”
“Why? Why do you insist on hovering over me as if I were a baby lion cub and you were my mother?”
Miles’s face suddenly really did look drained. “Please refrain from mentioning baby animals to me.”
Caught off guard by this telling flash of vulnerability, Clio blurted, “Don’t you love Mariana?” When he did not reply, she prompted him. “Don’t you? She is very beautiful.”
Miles chose not to answer.
“Oh,” Clio reached a hand up to cover her mouth. “I am sorry. Then you must still be in love with Beatrice.”
Somewhere inside Clio knew she had made a mistake. It was not just the way Miles’s eyes changed, or the way his jaw became set, or the way his hands clenched. Or rather it was. Because the strikingly handsome man that Miles was when he was calm became, when angered, a sublimely sensual animal whose proximity made Clio’s heart pound, and pound harder when Miles, all six and a half sublimely sensual feet of him, moved toward her. “I believe I asked you not to introduce that name into conversation, Lady Thornton.” He leaned down, bringing their faces closer. “The state of my affections is none of your concern. But the increasing state of my displeasure is. You still have not explained why you deemed it necessary to knock Corin unconscious with a blunt object.”
“I did not knock him out,” Clio corrected but without force. Her mouth had gone completely dry, making it hard to speak, or remember what she meant to say. “And I should think—” she broke off abruptly. Her eyes became huge. “Never mind. I am sorry. It will not happen again. You—You should go.”
Miles frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Just go,” Clio ordered him in an urgent whisper. “Now.”
But it was too late. The first hiccup sounded like a thunderclap in the small alcove.
Something that might have been amusement flashed in Miles’s eyes, and the tension in the room changed entirely. “So these are the famous violent hiccups,” he commented.
Clio was too terrified by what she might be preparing to do to him to muster a glare. “Go—” she hiccuped, “—away.”
“You really should try to be quieter,” Miles advised, stepping even closer. “We don’t want to disturb them.” He tilted his head in the direction of the other room.
Clio backed away from him until she ran into the wall, her mind racing. “I would have no trouble being quieter,” she whispered through clenched teeth, trying to swallow back her hiccups, “if you left me alone.” She hiccuped twice.
“Does it bother you awfully when people do not do what you say?” Miles asked with a faint smile.
She seemed to especially want to hurt him when he smiled. “This is no joke,” she told him, almost pleading through a pair of hiccups. “Please.” She hiccuped. “You had better leave—” she hiccuped, “—before I attack you—” she suppressed a hiccup, “—viciously.”
Instead of moving away, Miles closed the space between them. “Do you really want to hurt me?”
Clio could feel the battle to suppress her violent urges intensifying inside her, the hiccups coming more rapidly as he got closer, straining her restraints, pushing them to their limits. Her entire body felt warm, like she was seething—or rather, melting—with rage. “Yes,” she announced in a hoarse whisper, hiccuping three times. “I do. I must.”
“Go ahead,” Miles challenged, gazing directly into her eyes. “Show me that you are violent. Show me—”
Clio never got the chance to give him the disembowelment he so richly deserved. She did not hear the squeak of the alcove’s doorhandle, but Miles did, and he realized instinctively that there was only one way to keep whoever entered from seeing her.
His mouth came down over hers at the exact moment the door opened. It was an old and hackneyed trick, but it worked. The newcomer took two steps into the room, said, “Oh, my. Pardon me,” in a low voice, hesitated for a moment, and quickly backed out, reclosing the door behind him. The encroachment took exactly five and a half seconds.
The kiss went on considerably longer.
Long enough for Clio to realize that reading ten books about such matters, even one in Italian with illustrations, was not enough to teach her what it would be like. Long enough for her to understand that the kiss they had shared the day before had encompassed only a sliver of kissing possibilities. Long enough for her to feel her entire world shift under her, for her to feel her body pulse with a sensation that was simultaneously hot and chilling, thrilling and terrifying, for her to feel like she was being spun around and around by a mad whirlwind. Long enough for her to realize that what she had been feeling was different from violence.
Long enough for Miles to know it was a very bad idea, that he might as well take out a dagger and start giving himself deep, painful gashes. At least those would heal in time, he told himself. What feeling her lips against his was doing was irreversible damage. Three would not do what he was doing. He had just wanted to show her that the hiccups were not a sign that she was a fiend, to get her to stop thinking she was the vampire. So she would go home and leave him alone. He had just wanted to demonstrate a logical point—
Without taking his mouth from hers, he lifted her up, turned her around, and seated her on the edge of the library table, pulling her closer. They kissed in gulps, as if they had been starving, famished for the other’s touch. Her chest pressed against his, and he could sense the pounding of her heart beneath the thin fabric of her dress. He reached his hand up to feel it and her hand followed, resting atop it, their fingers entwined. Clio raised her other hand to the back of his head and urged his mouth over hers, opening her lips to his tongue, meeting it with her own. She did not know what she was doing, only that she wanted it to go on forever, until the explosion that was kindling inside her took place. And it might have, if the clock in the wall behind them had not abruptly struck midnight.
The chime startled both of them, shattered the space they had created, and they separated. Their eyes did not meet as the clock rang out twelve times. They were both lost in their own thoughts, their own self-recriminations, their own narratives of why that had been such a bad idea and should never happen again. When the last chime died down, Clio swallowed hard and addressed herself steadfastly to Miles’s thumb.
“Thank you, my lord. That was remarkably efficacious.”
Miles let his eyes settle on her chin. “Efficacious?”
“Usually I have to wait for the hiccups to go away. It can take hours. Although I have never had a bout of them as acute as that one, your treatment was swift and effective. I wonder that I have never read about it.” She spoke in a tone a curious alchemist might use about a promising experiment.
“I am glad I could help.”
“Yes,” she said, distractedly. It turned out that speaking to Miles’s thumb was not as neutral as she had hoped, because he kept moving it, rubbing its tip lightly along the edge of his index finger in an oval, which by some power she did not understand, made her body feel like it was being rubbed by the tip of his thumb in an oval, or if not exactly feel that way, then wish that it were feeling that way, which made it utterly impossible for her to move, or breathe, or think about what he was saying or what she was saying or really anything other than how to get him to touch her.
“—safe to return to my apartment,” Miles was explaining.
Clio nodded. Then she gasped, looked directly at him and whispered, “I think I hear someone else coming.”
“What—?” The rest of Miles’s words were lost as she pulled his lips toward her. They kissed for a moment, then he moved away slightly and asked, “You did not hear anyone, did you?”
Clio hesitated for a moment before shaking her head.
“Did you learn that in a book?”
She shook her head again. “No. From you. I was trying to be subtle.”
Miles contemplated her from the vantage point of the tip of her lovely nose. There was no question that she was going to make him ache. He was already aching. In all the salient parts of his body, and some parts he had forgotten he possessed. A smart man would say thank you very much and leave.
He cleared his throat and said, “I would advise against it.”
Clio looked away from him. “I am sorry. I just—”
“Against your trying to be subtle,” he went on. He was not a smart man. “You are very bad at it. However, I do not think you are unredeemable.” Miles turned her face back to his. His eyes melted into hers and his voice was molten. “Perhaps I can give you some lessons.” His lips brushed the place where her neck met her shoulder blade. “In fact,” he said, his mouth skimming along her delicious collarbone and making Clio tingle all over, “I think you should put yourself entirely in my hands. But you must obey me implicitly. Do you agree?”
Clio moaned slightly.
“I shall take that as a yes.”
Even if she had been able to speak, any possibility of protest drained from Clio as all ten of his fingertips caressed her shoulders. She closed her eyes, leaned back, and exposed the expanse of her neck to him. Miles kissed it softly with his lips, and felt her tremble.
A sensation, half awe and half anxiety, suffused him. What the devil was he doing? He had not felt desire, real desire, in a long long time, but he felt it now. Or something like it. It did not feel like he remembered. It was stronger, less focused on a single part of his body and more all encompassing. Alarm bells clanged in his head, and an image flashed into his mind, the image of a sign that hung on the door of a condemned building near his house in Venice, a board painted with a crude skull and crossbones and the words
DANGER, DO NOT ENTER!
in red.
DANGER! DO NOT ENTER!
his mind screamed at him. Turn back.
She was a virgin. He could not marry her, so he could not make love to her. And there was no question that was exactly what he wanted to do. What he was about to do.
Nonsense. He only wanted her pleasure, only wanted her to understand that she was not the vampire, that her hiccups were not violent. His desire for her was ephemeral, illusory, like the illusions of strength he created to mislead his enemies. That was why it felt so different. It would go away and leave him unscathed. He was in control. He was not fooled. He just wanted to make her feel good, to make her see she was not evil. He would not let things go too far.
He saw an uncut quill on the desk beside her, a tight, pointed goose feather. It would be perfect. As long as he only touched her with that, and his lips, as long as he did not let his fingers feel her skin, he would be fine. And she would learn her lesson.
DANGER!
He lightly traced the letters along the line of Clio’s bodice with the feathery side of the quill, just to prove to himself they held no menace, and followed them with his lips. He placed a kiss at the start of the shadowy valley between her breasts—how perfect they looked—and felt rather than heard her wavering sigh.
DANGER!
Feeling his lips nestled between her breasts, feeling his hair brush against her chin, Clio had thought she was in ecstasy, but when he let the feather he was holding dip into her bodice and brush against her nipple, she knew she had been wrong. The sensation was so powerful that it left her gasping, and she gasped harder as he pulled her bodice down slightly and lightly caressed her breast with his lips.
Her nipples were small and dark and perfectly smooth and the most beautiful things Miles had ever seen. He suckled her gently, reveling in the slight noises she was making, thrilled when she brought her hands behind his head and, twining her fingers in his hair, pressed his face against her harder. Her joy at his touch sparked something old and forgotten inside of him. The ache in his body grew almost overwhelming, but he ignored it. It was not real, just an illusion.
He kept his lips on her breast but moved the hand with the feather lower, until it was resting on the inside of her right ankle. Then, kissing her, he dragged the plume up, moving it in a long slow S along the curve of her calf, dipping it to caress behind her knee, winding it up and then inching it, with excruciating slowness, along the tender inside of her thigh. He used his other hand to push the skirt and petticoats of her gown up, and his fingers accidentally brushed the supple skin of her leg.