Susan Johnson (4 page)

Chu was politely bowing and taking his leave, Empress noted, and she squared her small shoulders.

The woman had been silent during the transaction, assessing him with those enormous green eyes. Trey wondered briefly what calculations were clicking away behind those intense, vigorous eyes. Turning back from bidding Chu goodbye, his question was answered, for she said bluntly, “I want my share in gold.”

It stopped him for a blank moment. Too much brandy for too many hours, plus the sudden demand on a snowy evening long after the banks had closed, took a second to register. His mind raced over the feasible options, and none produced $37,500 in gold at this hour of the night. “Listen, darling …”
he began, giving her his full attention for the first time since they’d walked into the dining room.

“I’m not your darling.” Her voice was softly defensive, her lush green eyes provocatively assertive.

Trey’s dark brows shot up, his eyes widened with interest, and another non-plussed moment passed in which Trey restrained himself from remarking that for fifty thousand dollars she was anything he cared to call her. “Forgive me,” he said instead, smiling faintly at her brash courage and small set chin. “Do you have a name, then?” he said on the mildest note of inquiry, his pale glance sliding down her throat to the tantalizing juncture where worn flannel met her sun-kissed flesh.

“Of course,” she declared in the same quietly commanding tone.

He waited expectantly, his gaze roving slowly upward again until his insouciant eyes met her slightly forbidding ones. It didn’t appear as though the lady would be lukewarm to bed. More like making love to a very small wildcat, he casually concluded. And his desire stirred at the prospect. All of the women in his vast and varied past had been obligingly willing. And while making love was a pleasure whatever the circumstances, his interest was piqued by this very expensive and feisty little chit, independent and self-assured enough to offer herself for sale without any feminine trappings of silk or satin, ribbons or bows.

As the silence lengthened between them, with the man who was rich enough to pay a fortune for three weeks of her time calmly gazing at her, she reluctantly said, “Empress Jordan.”

The little beauty was full of surprises. She said the name as though she inherently deserved the title, and a kingdom to go with it. A Gallic kingdom from the sound of the softly pronounced name. His luminous, tolerant glance surveyed her. “Well, Empress,” Trey said quietly, “the banks are closed now and Lily doesn’t keep that amount of gold on hand, but if you’ll take my bank draft now, we’ll go across the street in the morning and have Ferguson count out the gold for you. Will that do?” He leaned back in his chair, looked at her with interest, and added in a needless aside, “I’m good for it. Rest easy.”

Even living back in the mountains with her family in a secluded
valley, Empress had heard of the Braddock-Blacks. Who in Montana hadn’t? She reflected for a moment, torn between urgent necessity and blind instinct. Exhaling quietly, she said, “Very well. I’ll accept the bank draft until tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, darling,” Trey replied ironically, “for your exquisite faith.…”

And this time she didn’t correct him.

“So … here you are …” he said very slowly a moment later, handing her the check. His deep voice was rich with suggestion, but for a moment after his fingers released the check, he did nothing more, as if in deep contemplation. Then his hand, callused across the top of the palm like a working cowboy’s, dropped back on the table, and his dark brows rose slightly. “Should we?” He gracefully gestured toward the hallway leading upstairs.

He saw her swallow once before she replied in a curiously unsure voice, “Yes … all right.” And she hurriedly stuffed the check into her shirt pocket.

Trey rose and, walking around the narrow table, pulled her chair back as she stood. Looking down at her from what appeared to be an enormous height to Empress’s suddenly frightened mind, he offered her his arm. Shaking her head, she looked away. Tactfully he suggested, “Perhaps you’d like to go on ahead. It’s the second door on the right at the top of the stairs. I’ll send a maid up with bathwater for you.”

“Bathwater?” Empress queried in a tiny voice. She could feel the strength of his presence, the concealed energy lightly controlled, even though he hadn’t touched her.

“And a robe,” he added. “I’m not partial to your range clothes.”

Empress drew herself stiffly erect for a moment to offer a sharp retort to the slur on her attire but immediately thought better of it. After all, he was paying her $37,500 in gold tomorrow morning, and visions of how that fortune would aid her family stifled the words in her throat. Her blood was as blue as his, bluer if quarterings mattered, which they didn’t, out here on the rough frontier where survival depended on gold—on her—at the moment. Not on any aristocratic background,
however fine its pedigree. “Will you be long?” she asked to cover the flurry of her insecurities and trepidation.

“No,” he said, his tone low and heated. “I won’t keep you waiting.”

Striding back into the parlor, Trey conferred briefly with Lily, who immediately sent a maid scurrying off. Then he pleasantly accepted the good-natured masculine teasing directed at him. Ignored the black hatred of Jake Poltrain’s drunken gaze, and drank another half bottle with his cousins before he excused himself and ascended the stairs.

H
e knocked once before he opened the door and walked in with a loose-limbed grace that accented paradoxically both his leanness and his power.

Empress was stepping out of the tub into a large towel held by the maid. Lambent firelight gilded her slender form and glistened sleekly down the silky length of her hair. Trey’s breath caught in his throat. Her slim, full-breasted body was framed by the large white towel all lush, opulent curves and satiny flesh, like a golden Venus. An experienced man, he considered himself beyond surprise apropos of beautiful nude women, but even he was struck by the perfection that had been hidden under the plain, mannish garb.

With a nod of his head he dismissed the maid, his eyes never leaving the arresting beauty of the young, naked woman before him, bewitched by the powerful sense of innocence she evoked. Perhaps it was the setting. One didn’t expect such delicate purity in a brothel. Or maybe it was the white lilac fragrance wafting toward him from her damp hair and skin. The scent was springlike on this stormy winter night, unblemished,
like the woman who reminded him too vividly, even in his pleasantly brandy-warmed state, of a young child. Suddenly he wasn’t sure why she struck his sensibilities so, for her body was very unchildlike. It was, in fact, very rich and womanly, like one of Lily’s extravagant twenty-course dinners that provoked every bodily sense with tantalizing guile. It was her eyes, he finally decided—they were frightened and much too large with apprehension. So he said without thinking, “Don’t be frightened. I don’t have Jake Poltrain’s tastes.”

His cryptic words were anything but soothing, he realized immediately, for her hands trembled slightly at her sides. But her chin came up like it had downstairs, and he recognized the same intrepid mettle. As if some small, inner voice indomitably resisted the fear. “I won’t hurt you,” he said very softly. “You’re perfectly safe.”

Whatever inner anxiety had prompted the fright was apparently resolved, for she replied calmly while she reached for a towel hung near the fire, “Safe, I suppose, only if liberally interpreted, Mr. Braddock-Black. But warm and clean, certainly.” And tossing the towel over her head, she bent over and began rubbing her hair dry.

Crossing the distance separating them in three swift strides, Trey pulled the towel away, tossed it aside, and said in a level voice, graphic with self-control, “I
won’t
hurt you, I mean it.”

Straightening, she stood before him, unabashed in her nudity, and raising her emerald eyes the required height to meet his so far above, she said with Byzantine inflection, “What
will
you do with me, Mr. Braddock-Black?”

“Trey,” he ordered, unconscious of his lightly commanding tone.

“What
will
you do with me, Trey?” she repeated, correcting herself as ordered. But there was more than a hint of impudence in her tone and in her tilted mouth and arched brow.

Responding to the impudence with some of his own, he replied with a small smile, “Whatever you prefer, Empress, darling.” He towered over her, clothed and booted, as dark as Lucifer, and she was intensely aware of his power and size, as if his presence seemed to invade her. “You set the pace, sweetheart,” he said encouragingly, reaching out to slide the pad of one finger slowly across her shoulder. “But take your time,” he went on, recognizing his own excitement, running
his warm palm up her neck and cupping the back of her head lightly. Trey’s voice had dropped half an octave. “We’ve three weeks.…” And for the first time in his life he looked forward to three undiluted weeks of one woman’s company. It was like scenting one’s mate, primordial and reflexive, and while his intellect ignored the peremptory, inexplicable compulsion, his body and blood and dragooned sensory receptors willingly complied to the urgency.

Bending his head low, his lips touched hers lightly, brushing twice across them like silken warmth before he gently slid over her mouth with his tongue and sent a shocking trail of fire curling deep down inside her.

She drew back in an unconscious response, but he’d felt the heated flame, too, and from the startled look in his eyes she knew the spark had touched them both. Trey’s breathing quickened, his hand tightened abruptly on the back of her head, pulling her closer with insistence, with authority, while his other hand slid down her back until it rested warmly at the base of her spine. And when his mouth covered hers a second time, intense suddenly, more demanding, she could feel him rising hard against her. She may have been an innocent in the ways of a man and a woman, but Empress knew how animals mated in nature, and for the first time she sensed a soft warmth stirring within herself.

It was at once strange and blissful, and for a brief detached moment she felt very grown, as if a riddle of the universe were suddenly revealed. One doesn’t have to love a man to feel the fire, she thought. It was at odds with all her mother had told her. Inexplicably she experienced an overwhelming sense of discovery, as if she alone knew a fundamental principle of humanity. But then her transient musing was abruptly arrested, for under the light pressure of Trey’s lips she found hers opening, and the velvety, heated caress of Trey’s tongue slowly entered her mouth, exploring languidly, licking her sweetness, and the heady, brandy taste of him was like a fresh treasure to be savored. She tentatively responded like a lambkin to new, unsteady legs, and when her tongue brushed his and did her own unhurried tasting, she heard him groan low in his throat. Swaying gently against her, his hard length pressed more adamantly into her yielding softness. Fire raced downward to a tingling place deep inside her as Trey’s strong,
insistent arousal throbbed against the soft curve of her stomach. He held her captive with his large hand low on her back as they kissed, and she felt a leaping flame speed along untried nerve endings, creating delicious new sensations. Her nipples peaked hard, and there was strange pleasure in the feel of his soft wool shirt; a melting warmth seeped through her senses, and she swayed closer into the strong male body, as if she knew instinctively that he would rarefy the enchantment. A moment later, as her mouth opened pliantly beneath his, her hands came up of their own accord and, rich with promise, rested lightly on his shoulders.

Her artless naïveté was setting his blood dangerously afire. He gave her high marks for subtlety. First the tentative withdrawal, and now the ingenuous response, was more erotic than any flagrant vice of the most skilled lover. And yet it surely must be some kind of drama, effective like the scene downstairs, where she withheld more than she offered in the concealing men’s clothes and made every man in the room want to undress her.

Whether artifice, pretext, sham, or entreating supplication, the soft, imploring body melting into his, the small appealing hands warm on his shoulders, made delay suddenly inconvenient. “I think, sweet Empress,” he said, his breath warm on her mouth, “
next
time you can set the pace.…”

Bending quickly, he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the bed. Laying her down on the rose velvet coverlet, he stood briefly and looked at her. Wanton as a Circe nymph, she looked back at him, her glance direct into his heated gaze, and she saw the smoldering, iridescent desire in his eyes. She was golden pearl juxtaposed to blush velvet, and when she slowly lifted her arms to him, he, no longer in control of himself, not detached or casual or playful as he usually was making love, took a deep breath, swiftly moved the half step to the bed, and lowered his body over hers, reaching for the buttons on his trousers with trembling fingers. His boots crushed the fine velvet but he didn’t notice; she whimpered slightly when his heavy gold belt buckle pressed into her silken skin, but he kissed her in apology, intent on burying himself in the devastating Miss Jordan’s lushly carnal body. The last trouser button slid out, and his maleness sprang free. His wool-clad legs pushed her pale thighs apart, and all he could think of
was the feel of her closing around him. He surged forward, and she cried out softly. Maddened with desire, he thrust forward again. This time he
heard
her cry. “Oh, Christ,” he breathed, urgent need suffocating in his lungs, “you can’t be a virgin.” He never bothered with virgins. It had been years since he’d slept with one. Lord, he was hard.