“So, lovely Lara, do you want to play a game? From the appearance of your absolutely breathtaking breasts, I would say you are ready for some relief, as am I.”
He was right. She ached, pulsing in both her tight nipples and between her legs. Dining with him half-naked had been both erotic and difficult. “What kind of game?” she asked, a little wary despite her need.
Anton looked amused, the bulge in his trousers belying the nonchalance of his pose as he stood next to her, gazing down into her face. “A game of submission. I will go first, if you wish, granting you every sexual command, obeying without pause. Then, when you have climaxed,”—his dark eyes were heavy and his lashes slightly lowered—, “it will be my turn. You will do whatever I say, no objections no matter the order. Whoever is in charge is most strictly so, agreed?”
She hesitated, since he had always assumed command during their erotic encounters, not certain she could bring herself to ask for what she wanted. In the back of her mind, she still tried to rationalize that she was there only because he forced her to be. If she requested he do certain things to her body, she was then as culpable, and as shamelessly depraved.
However, she needed him to make love to her immediately.
“I agree, but only if you are in charge first,” she said, lowering her lashes.
He touched her chin with a long finger, tilting her head up. “You will do my every bidding?” he asked. “On your word?”
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His dark gaze was almost scalding, it was so intense. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Keep in mind I will do yours as well, once I am…finished.” He laughed lightly, his fingers sliding across her cheek. “Very well, I have no objection to beginning. Take off your dress, if it even can be called a dress. I think it is more a Satan’s tool, designed to send a man into madness, but whatever it is called, get it off now.”
“Yes,” she agreed, reaching for the fastenings.
“Call me master,” he instructed. “Let me hear it. I want to know I have a humble and compliant sex slave.”
Sex slave?
Not subservient by nature, Lara hesitated, her dress already to her waist. However, the promise in his tall, muscled body was not something she could ignore and the impressive bulge between his legs sent a shiver of memory down her spine. “Yes, Master,” she said meekly, letting her dress slide to the floor.
“I suppose,” he sounded theatrically bored, despite his obvious arousal, “you want me to fuck you again, Countess?”
“Yes.” As she stood there nude, the word was nothing but an exhale. She did. Very much.
“Yes…what?” There was delicate warning in the question.
“Yes, Master.”
“What if I wanted something from you first? I think my cock is hungry for your pretty mouth.” His long fingers went to his trousers and he unfastened them slowly, letting his erection spring free, the tip slick already with drops of semen. “Come here and suck this,” he said softly. “On your knees now, and show me how talented your tongue is. If you please me, I will put this,” he said as he stroked himself lightly, running his fingers from testicles to the seeping tip and back down, “inside you.”
A flame seemed to have ignited inside her. Dropping to her knees as requested, Lara inhaled his musky male scent and his penis jutted forth in stark carnal offering. She touched it, grasping the thick shaft,
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watching in fascination as more fluid seeped from the hole in the distended tip.
Tentatively, she licked the very top, amazed when the organ jerked in her hand. His fingers slid into her hair.
“Suck me,” Anton instructed, the timbre of his voice lowered audibly. Then he said huskily, “Good God, have you any idea what it is like to see you on your knees and your mouth so close?”
She had some idea, since she sensed his tension, both in the way he held her head and in the pulse of his manhood under her fingers.
Emboldened, she took the very tip into her mouth, and then slid down as far as possible.
The usually formidably, self-possessed
comte
gasped in a hiss of sound.
Smiling inwardly, Lara began to suck carefully, rubbing him with her tongue, running it up and down the hard, silky length in her mouth, unskilled but not ineffective, for he cursed after just a few moments and his fingers clenched against her scalp. She tasted the salty weep of semen in the back of her throat.
Moving up and down, she learned the length and texture of his erect sex, swirling over the bulging crest, sliding down until she nearly choked.
Raspy breathing filled the air. All at once, he groaned, his hands slipping to her cheeks as he said hoarsely, “That damned dress, I was too close already…stop or I’ll come in your mouth.”
Not certain she wished to stop, triumphant that she finally had him in a situation where he quivered and shook in an open loss of control, she ignored the tug on her hair and continued, sucking harder, wondering if it was anything like what she experienced when he put his mouth between her legs.
“Lara…I mean it, Jesus…I don’t think I can stop…even now…oh,
diable,
it is too late…”
She felt it with an inner amazement, the sudden fierce rush of sperm into her mouth, making her almost choke, his long-fingered
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hands cradling her head as he groaned his orgasmic release. It was all she could do to swallow the thick substance, but it wasn’t unpleasant, just too much at once. Leaning back on her heels, she freed his halfrigid erection, licking her lips to catch the droplets that had escaped.
In front of her, Anton stood with his breeches open, his eyes darkened, his face flushed. Without warning, he scooped her up suddenly in his arms and carried her to the bed. “Now,” he said, his voice still not steady, “it’s my turn. You were a most obedient slave, my sweet. Tell me what you want. I am anxious to do anything in my power to please you. God knows you just pleased me beyond measure.”
She looked like an exotic goddess from some ancient fable, her lips still glistening with his sexual discharge, her satiny hair disheveled. Not quite able to believe how quickly and forcefully he had spent himself in her mouth, Anton was relieved she was not one of those women who felt ill at the very thought of oral sex, much less at swallowing the result.
Her smile was slow, exuding female power, and she stretched her slender body like a cat, reclining on the dark river of her loose hair.
“The game has turned? I can command anything?”
“Oh, yes.” Trying to imagine something she would request that he didn’t want to do was impossible. Stripping out of his clothes so hastily he heard his shirt rip, Anton waited, his arousal already growing again.
As if empowered by his recent precipitous ejaculation and loss of control, she lay there, looking at him with heavy-lidded eyes, slowly letting her legs fall apart. “Lick this,” she ordered as she ran her fingers along the line of her cleft, the subtle gesture making him quicken, “but touch me nowhere else. Not with your hands or body. I
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just want your mouth here.” Her finger graphically touched her labia, stroking lightly, making him take in a swift breath.
“Of course,” he agreed readily, not so sure he could comply. Her breasts had beckoned him all evening and he was dying to touch them.
As he sank down on the bed, he made the mistake of reaching out to try to stroke her inner thighs, but she immediately chided, “No hands. I want only your mouth and tongue. Otherwise, you are not welcome. This is for my pleasure, not yours.”
“Yes, as you wish.”
Her thighs were wide open, and he positioned himself there, lying on his stomach between her legs, his mouth grazing her heated core.
More experienced, chagrined at his earlier reckless loss of restraint, he vowed inwardly to make her beg, obediently beginning to lightly lick those soft, fluid lips. She moaned at once, opening wider, lifting her hips.
Tasting her arousal, his nostrils flaring at her female scent, he continued to only brush that intriguing line, running his tongue along the cleft of her folds but not probing farther. Up and down, he licked a carnal path, tasting but not feasting. Arms at her sides, her eyes closed, Lara lay and let him minister to her body, growing tense …and frustrated.
Smiling, knowing full well she needed him to increase the pace, to find her sensitive nub and touch it, he restrained himself, supplicant and on his stomach, doing her bidding but not fulfilling her needs. His tongue was busy but never delved into the tender tissue beyond her labia, and her moans turned into pants.
“Anton,” she said hoarsely, arching.
“What, my love?” He kissed her dark thatch of pubic hair.
“I have a feeling,” she gasped, “that you are teasing me on purpose. That negates the game, doesn’t it?”
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“If you tell me exactly what you want, I will do it. You said to lick you here, and I have complied.” As if to prove his point, he lightly ran his tongue once more across her soft, pliant folds.
“Please…God in heaven, Anton, you know what to do, no one better.”
“Don’t ask me, tell me. Remember our game?”
“Make me climax,” she ordered heatedly. “Now.”
“Certainly.” He delved deep into her cleft, finding her swollen nub and sucking on it, tasting the nectar flowing there as she cried and shook almost at once. Her body tightened and her hands flew into his hair, holding him there hard with his mouth pressed between her legs, her slim thighs quivering. He continued to gently nibble and tease her until she went lax, her legs limp and open.
With a grin, he rose up and moved over her. “The balance of power has shifted again, my sweet.”
Eyes half-closed, she murmured, “You will have to excuse me, but I don’t have the strength to obey any orders right now.”
She did look superbly replete, her skin damp and pink with orgasmic afterglow. Anton laughed. “Let me use your body for my pleasure, then. You need do nothing but lie there and enjoy it. I am hard again…my cock forgets I am thirty-four and not eighteen when I am near you. Here, can you feel it?”
His erection rubbed against the softness of her smooth stomach and he nuzzled her neck, smelling her fragrant silky hair, finding her mouth and kissing her tenderly. Her arms did come up around his neck and she sighed into his mouth. With a feeling of almost wonder, he began to make love to her with slow reverence, marveling at her beauty, but even more so at how perfectly their passions seemed to match. Each response, even so much as a caught breath, inflamed him.
Was this love
? he wondered, as he entered the softness and heat between her legs, pleasure flooding his senses as he began to thrust inside her.
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Lust, he told himself quickly, dismissing the notion. More intense than any he’d known, but still just lust.
But later, when they were both exhausted and satisfied and she slept peacefully next to him, he lay there and watched the moon hang outside the window, listening to the soft sound of her breathing in the dark. Unsettled yet physically content, he pondered his complicated feelings for his gorgeous English countess.
He wanted her.
The truth was, he felt like he
needed
her. Perhaps Bernard was correct and she was different…the mate of his soul, not just his body.
Certainly she was everything he’d ever imagined wanting in a wife— intelligent, refined, beautiful, passionate…
And if he married her, she would be protected forever from prosecution for her part in the covert activities of Medes and his group. Even if the entire lot of them testified she was an accomplice, no one would hang his wife. Damn Lacroux to hell, she would be beyond his malicious touch.
However, she might also be barren. In four years of marriage, she had not conceived. And he was the Comte de Roussel, with titles and estates that should be passed on to a male heir. If he married a virgin and his wife failed to bear his child, that was one thing, but to marry someone proven unlikely to conceive was another. He was a practical man, and had responsibilities both to his family and his position.
It was a devil of a dilemma.
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It was a beautiful day, the sky dazzling, the perfumed air fragrant with both the smell of flowers and the less elegant odor of horse manure. Holding her parasol lightly above her head to protect her complexion from the pouring sunshine, Lara watched as a superb black thoroughbred pounded past where she sat, his muscles rippling powerfully in his shoulders, his coat sleek and shining. The crowd erupted in cheers as he passed the finish line easily ahead of the other horses on the track, shouting their approval for his incredible speed and beauty.
“That was one of Anton’s horses,” the woman sitting next to her pointed out. “Neptune, I believe is his name. The
comte
is fond of naming his racers after the gods. Rather appropriate I think, since he looks a bit like a Greek god himself, wouldn’t you say, Countess?”
Glancing over sharply, Lara tried to read the expression on Helena Marmont’s face. Shapely and attractive, there was something unusual about her looks, perhaps the tip-tilted shape of her eyes and the fullness of her mouth that rendered her still striking without being actually pretty. Her hair was brown, her features regular, and she was, at a guess, about thirty.
The wife of one of Anton’s friends, they had been introduced briefly once before back in Paris, but Lara hadn’t realized they lived only a few miles from the villa and that’s why Anton had chosen to buy it. During his stays there alone, he’d told her, he often went to dinner at their estate.
Henri Marmont was older, a courtly gentleman with beautiful manners and an apparent shared passion for horseracing. Both men
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were down in the paddock area, and she had been left with Helena in the stands.
“Anton is undeniably handsome,” Lara agreed neutrally, wondering with a pang if Anton had ever slept with this woman, hence the comment. Somehow, she didn’t think he was the type to betray a friend, but considering his reputation, it was the first thing that came to mind.