The Corrupt Comte (32 page)

She wriggled her hips, and her head dropped to rest on a pillow. “All right—what are
you
d-doing?”

The faint hitch in her breathy words shot a pulse of wanting through his torso. Fingertips digging into the giving flesh of her hip, he drew back his other hand and, without warning, brought it down sharply on one cheek of her deliciously rounded ass.

“Gaspard!” She tried to crawl forward, an instinctive reflex, but her hands were bound and her cheek was in the pillow and there was nowhere for her to run. “What—?”

“That is for what you said.” He was already stroking the stinging spot, soothing the heated area, his anger having transitioned into something hotter, better. But perhaps it had never been anger. Perhaps…perhaps it had been fear. Shifting, he brought his arm across his body and laid a resounding slap on her other cheek.

Her squeal made his cock throb…because she didn’t sound displeased, exactly.

“Are you
s-sp-spanking
m-me?”

“Yes.” And he spanked her again, not hard—just enough to turn her perfect white skin cherry-pink. “For what you said.” He couldn’t forgive her for that, and he needed her to know.

She pushed back toward him with a sweet little gasp as he petted the curvy backside he wanted to shape and squeeze and spread more than he wanted to breathe. “What…what did I s-s-say?” Her knees shifted wider, her shoulders dropping deeper into the mattress, and he saw her eyes drift closed as she stretched her arms over her head.

The ribbon tails lay stark against the pristine white of the bed linens, snaring his gaze until a wiggle of her hips brought her ass in contact with his groin, and it was like being struck by lightning—lust-filled lightning that wiped his brain of all coherent thought. He jerked, then gritted his teeth and smacked one cheek, then another, then repeated the action for the pure, prurient pleasure of watching her bottom bounce after each spank.

His palm felt scalded when he stopped, releasing his hold on her hip to do what he wanted and spread her cheeks apart, thumbs dipping toward her cunt.

Her slick, pink cunt, all creamy and beckoning for his touch, his tongue. For him.

Shaking his head as his mouth watered, he growled and leaned down to nip hard at one freshly spanked buttock. “You ask what we have.” Another growl, nearer to a groan as he dipped two fingertips between her wet folds. A shudder chased down his spine as her moan filled the air. “You ask what we have, if not this.”

“G-Gaspard…”

Roughly, he flipped her over onto her back, gripping her knees to make room for his hips. “I say, look at what we have
because of
this.” Again, his fingers parted the curls shielding her, gathering the cream he wanted to lap from her in slow, steady passes of his tongue. No more anger, no more fear. Only him and her, Gaspard and Claudia, and pain—sweet, terrible pain—gathered in his chest. “Now I ask you a question.”

“Yes?”

“Why are you so…so…?”

“S-so what?”

He didn’t have the words, not in her language, maybe not in his. Bowing his spine, he licked her from the soft curve of her belly, over her navel and up between her breasts until he reached her throat. She threw her head back, and he found her pulse with his lips. It raced as his tongue circled, teasing in time with the prodding of his cock at her slick entrance.

Her hips lifted, encouraging. “Why am I s-s-so…open?”

He pushed the head inside, just barely.

“Why am I s-so wet?”

Another inch, and sweat broke out on his brow.

She wrapped her legs around his, knees clasping his hips. “S-s-so yours?” With those damning words, she arched her back, drawing him fully into her body on a slow, thick slide of pure pleasure.

He shuddered when she moaned, her words barely penetrating. “Mine?”

She shifted, urging him to move within her. “I want m-my hands, G-Gaspard. Untie m-me.”

“
Non,
” he grunted, even as he grabbed for her bound wrists above her head, his other hand punching into the mattress near her shoulder. “Not…until…you tell me.” He punctuated each word with a shallow thrust, dying with the feel of being buried so deeply within her clasping cunt. “You said you were mine.”

She strained against him as her eyes squeezed shut. “No.”

“
Oui.
You are mine.” Another thrust.

“Untie m-me.”

He sank his teeth into her shoulder. “
Mine
, kitten. Admit it.” He bit down gently, and she went so wet around him, so tight and the heat of it… God. God, it was good, so good. “Whose are you?”

“Yours,” she breathed. “Yours, always yours. Gaspard—”

“Claudia,
mon
ange.
” Capturing one end of the ribbon, he pulled, and then her hands were free and tangling in his hair, urging his mouth to hers for a kiss that started in a frenzy but slowed, deepening to match every thrust of his cock inside her. He could hear his heart again, and he listened to each pumping beat as their tongues met and mated. Catching her lower lip between his teeth, he nipped lightly, playfully. “This, like this.” To have her like this, at home in his arms, in their bed…he had never in the entirety of his twisted life known such utter peace.

And he wasn’t even sated yet. “Promise me,” he demanded, feeling the threads inside him shredding—only now, as his control faltered and his dominance tempered, there was no threat spurring him into madness. This time was theirs, uninterrupted and unhindered by the world outside this house. “Promise me it will be like this between us, from now onward.”

She brought his forehead to hers, noses nuzzling, lashes fluttering against his. “Is that what you want?”

With a grunt, he wrapped his arms around her waist and sat them both upright, his weight going back on his heels as she straddled him, buried to the hilt in heaven. “It is what I want only if you want it too.” He gripped her by the waist and began to thrust up into her again. “Tell me,
chaton
.”

Her arms looped around his shoulders, fingernails digging into the knotted muscles of his shoulder blades. She moaned with every pump of his hips, every slick, needy slide of her cunt on his cock. Her breaths were choppy and harsh, her mouth hovering over his with the temptation of a kiss. “Yes.”

He froze. “Yes?”

Her lips touched his, open and sweet. “Yes, I p-promise.”

His brain went fuzzy. That promise was what he wanted, all he wanted, except— “Stay.” He moved within her again. “Stay with me.”

“G-Gaspard—”

“Stay with me, Claudia.” Faster, each thrust faster and harder, every word clipped and panted. “Stay and I will make you happy. This is
my
promise.” Then even words fell away, and he was lost in her as she kissed him, then as she cried out and clamped around him, and, at last, as he spilled his seed on a choked groan.

For a sensation purported to be fleeting, this happiness seemed to have woven itself into the very fibers of his scorched soul and knotted there, never to be severed.
I love you. Oh, how I love you.

Her skin was damp with perspiration when he rolled them onto the mattress on their sides. Burying his face in the crook of her neck, he breathed in her scent—the scent of home. He barely noticed when her arms fell away, but he heard her whisper of, “I’ll st-stay.”

More, he heard her tears. “
Bébé…
” Carefully combing the rich, dark strands of tangled hair back from her temple, he peered down at her shadowed face, evening having fallen during their lovemaking and leaving the bedchamber only faintly lit by the low-burning hearth. His thumb petted her tear tracks, droplets left on his calloused skin when she turned her face into the pillow, effectively shutting him out.

For long moments, Gaspard waited—for her to turn over and tell him what grieved her, for her to further expound on her promise to stay. For her to order him from her rooms. But she did none of those things, and eventually her body went completely lax against him, her breathing deep and even with the cadence of sleep. The room grew darker, but he couldn’t drift off as Claudia had done, unable to soothe the unsettling turmoil that had sprung to life too soon on the heels of their interlude.

Finally, he could take staring at the ceiling no longer and slid silently from the bed, tucking the bedclothes around her. Donning his discarded trousers, he walked to the hearth, staring down into the tamed embers. Gripping the iron poker loosely in one hand, he stoked the kindling, stifling the insistent urge to peer back over his shoulder at the woman he’d left in bed. Instead, he prodded the fire, poking it again and again, encouraging the flames to dance and hiss.

When he heard her shift beneath the covers, it turned out he couldn’t resist that urge.

The blue velvet throw bunched as Claudia rolled over in her sleep, face buried in the pillows, dark hair wild and untamed, obscuring her face. A lump formed in his throat. She had wreaked havoc with his heart from the day of their meeting—an organ she’d so recently brought to life, and now it beat only for her. A poetically cruel twist of fate, he mused wryly, that he should thaw just as she began to freeze.

Would their lovemaking today be enough to melt her? Would she hold to her promise and stay, not for a few days but for forever? He had tried to show her with his body what he refused to admit in words, but even he knew that was a paltry substitute for what she deserved to hear from him.

No one had ever bothered to peel away his façade as a deviant spy and see what lurked beneath the abuse and the hatred and the perversions that had ingrained themselves in his meager scrap of moral fiber. He had never stopped being broken after Marcel de Courreaux had twisted his psyche, but he’d hidden it. Gaspard had hidden it very, very well. Until Claudia.

He loved her, but loving her hadn’t made him any less broken.

As if summoned by his thoughts, the walking stick drew his gaze where it leaned casually next to the door, opposite the still-packed trunk and valise. He’d placed it there hours earlier after entering the bedchamber, intending nothing more than a healthy tupping of his new bride to officially consummate their marriage. His tortured past would always hang over their lives like a specter. He would always have whored himself to immoral men in the name of the king, but it had been a guise—one covering a simple truth.

He hadn’t thought he could be anyone else, anyone greater.

He moved to the door and grasped the walking stick, his thumb brushing across the inscription. His mind blanked for a moment, limbs numb and nausea threatening until he calmed the turmoil with slow, deep breaths through his nose.

Marcel de Courreaux had caned him with a gift from his wife. Now Gaspard had a wife of his own, one whom he had that very morning promised to honor and cherish until death parted them. He couldn’t undo the damage he’d already inflicted upon her, any more than he could erase the ugliness of his past.

But he could banish one specter in particular.

Carrying the walking stick to the hearth, he tossed it in without hesitation. The fire crackled and popped angrily around its new nourishment, and Gaspard watched it burn until there were nothing but clumps of ash and silver left in the grate. Then he shed his trousers and climbed back into bed, curling his body around the softer, smaller form of his kitten.

Gaspard might be a mangled wreck of a man, warped in untold ways, but he finally had something the broken, desperate Gaspard of five years ago had never had.

Hope.

Chapter Eighteen

26 February 1820

When the new butler announced that Lieutenant Sabien Purvis had come to call on her, specifically, Claudia wondered why she wasn’t more surprised.

“P-please give me five m-minutes, then sh-show him in,” she murmured from her seat on the pale blue divan in her morning room, not bothering to look up as the butler departed. The book in her lap had been open to the thirty-first page for the last hour, her gaze trained unseeingly on the paragraphs of black ink.

Claudia wasn’t at all curious as to why Sabien had come to visit so soon after her marriage, when any other soul would leave two newlyweds in peace—at least for twenty-four hours. His words at the wedding breakfast yesterday—
I care only for Gaspard’s happiness, my lady…and now yours as well
—had spurred her need to escape, and resulted in unanticipated consequences for her when she reached the bedchamber that afternoon.

Her backside still smarted from the spanking she’d received…but if she were honest, she relished the lingering sting. That sting was the reassurance of her husband’s possession, and her continued struggle to accept the reality of their marriage—that all of society thought them a joke, and her a pitiable fool—had eased somewhat when he promised none but her.

Sabien’s presence soured the memories of the night before, which she had been replaying over and over in her mind before the butler’s untimely arrival. Setting aside the book, she fussed with the deep burgundy of her skirts, settling them more smoothly over her legs. It was a bitingly cold day in London for so late in February, with frost on the ground and gray in the sky, but the fire leaping behind its intricately crafted iron grate warmed the room substantially.

A blacksmith would have made that grate, she mused. A blacksmith such as Gaspard’s father—or perhaps Gaspard himself, as Luc-Gaspard Tannet, had he never left home for the army.