Unmasqued: An Erotic Novel of The Phantom of The Opera (11 page)

“Is there something you wish to say?” she asked.

“Please…may I come?”

She did not answer; she gave him a delicate stroke that sent tremors rippling over his stomach. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back onto the bed.

“Please…”

She tightened her fingers around his cock. Warm velvet it was, and she wanted to feel it inside her. Her sex was awakening again, even after the intense orgasm. Her breasts tightened. Saliva pooled in her mouth.

She stroked him, twice, hard and fast, and then released him when she felt him get ready to let go.

“No, you may not.”

Carlotta straddled him and slipped his cock up inside her slick
inner lips, her mouth opening in a silent moan of pleasure. She moved, rocked, once, to settle his length, then looked down at him.

He stared up at the ceiling, eyes focused on it as though it held some great secret of immortality. His handsome face was set, unmoving, his nostrils flared as though to draw in greater amounts of air. The vein in his neck contracted madly and she saw that…

“I did not give you permission to move your hand.”

Guy drew in a harsh breath and closed his eyes. He replaced the hand that had moved from behind his head back where it belonged. His lips moved; Carlotta thought perhaps that they moved to form the word “please.”

“Open your eyes,” she ordered. “Watch me. If you take your eyes off me, your punishment will be boundless.”

He obediently opened his eyes and she shifted her hips deliberately. She saw the way his lids flickered and twitched and his breath hitched…but he did not look away. His eyes did not roll back into his head as she was certain they wanted to.

“Very good,” she purred. And twitched her hips again, harder, and tightened her inner lips around him. This time his lips moved involuntarily and his breath stopped, his chest full…then, after a moment, started again.

She gathered her breasts in her hands and began to pluck at her hard nipples, sending those delicious sensations down to her sex. She licked her lips, watching in delight as Guy mirrored her by licking his own lips.

She rose up on his cock, and back down, and up again, and watched him struggle to maintain his composure…and congratulated herself, not for the first time, on her student. This find of hers…this lustful man who was little more than a boy willing to be molded and taught…and tortured. Would the Comte de Chagny be so pliable?

Somehow, she thought not.

She rocked on his cock, not up and down, but back and forth, making certain the head of his cock stroked the special spot inside her vagina, and pressed against her nib. Her own breath was coming faster, and she heard his even when her eyes were closed.

She opened them, and saw to her delight that he was still watching her, a desperate expression blazing in his eyes. His mouth gapped; his arms strained behind his head, muscles bulging.

Carlotta lifted herself up and began to work up and down on his cock. He gasped, and shuddered, and begged, “Please, please, let me fuck you.…Let me…fuck…you.…”

“No,” she told him. “No!”

She worked harder, watching his face, judging when he was coming close, and stopped in time, settled on him. Felt the huge cock inside her and the beautiful throb of her pip pushed against it.

She smiled. He groaned. She pinched her nipple. He watched.

She leaned forward and offered one to him, and he sucked on it like he was starving. It hurt and it sent a ripple of need down to her sex and she pulled away, causing a loud smacking sound from his lips.

“Guy.” She said his name gently, and it took a moment for him to focus on her eyes instead of her breasts. He did not appear to have the energy to speak. “What do you want?”

He stared at her…dragged in his breath, exhaled the words, “Fuck…you…”

“Say it, say it louder,” she coaxed, arching backward to place her hands on his thighs. Her breasts jutted out in front of her and he focused avidly on them.

“I want…to fuck…you.…”

“Fuck me, then.
Fuck me.
”

And then suddenly, she was on her back, and Guy was rearing over her, using his knee to keep her legs apart as he gripped her shoulders. He slammed inside of her, slammed into her quim, into the top of her vagina, harder and harder, faster and faster. Carlotta moaned as he hit that inner spot, ramming against it, until she quaked with an orgasm from the inside out.

She reached up behind and grabbed the iron scrollwork, felt her breasts jouncing and bouncing with his desperate rhythm. Her orgasm went on and on; she lifted her hips, met his, violently, with every thrust. It was hot and wet and they slid together, in and out, in and out.…He groaned, cried out, jammed himself inside her one final time, and she felt him coursing inside the long hot tunnel of her, and she shuddered too.

He collapsed on her, his heavy, sweaty body deliciously hot, his chest ramming against her breasts.

Carlotta slapped him on the bare ass. “We will discuss your punishment tomorrow.”

And, knees trembling, she rolled from the bed, grinning, determined to sing tonight…and to snare herself a
comte.
Ghost or no ghost.

Raoul crossed the stage rapidly, resisting the desire to duck when he heard a particularly loud crash behind him. Only hours before the evening’s performance, it was a madhouse in here! However could they be ready in time?

The chaos was deafening. He tightened his fingers around the huge bunch of stems he carried. This was even worse than being on a ship’s deck during a violent storm, trying to secure the lines and keep oneself from being washed overboard.

Someone was hammering nails onto a piece of scenery with great vigor; a backdrop was being lowered from its high rigging and had been caught on something, so it was now being shaken with a violence that caused Raoul no little concern. A piece of glass was being fitted into the hole in a wall of scenery; someone shouted to “Watch out!” and another person yelled, “Behind you!”

All in all, he wished he’d chosen a different route to the backstage dressing rooms than through the front doors of the Opera House, down among the stalls, up onto the stage, and behind it. Particularly during the day, when there was a cacophony of preparation for the performance of
Faust
that night, these halls were difficult to navigate.

He stepped around a flat being carried from the seemingly depthless wings, and, adjusting his hat so that it sat straight on his crown, he hurried along between more flats, tables, costumiers, carpenters, wigmakers, and scenery docks, finding his way only by chance because, of course, he’d been to Christine’s dressing room only one time.

But as it turned out, Raoul did not need to find his way to her private room, for as he passed along the hall, one of the dancers, whose name he had no reason to recall, attracted his attention. “Are you looking for Miss Daaé?” she asked. But she gave him a look from under her lashes, complete with dimple and tucked chin, that suggested she would prefer he was not.

“I am indeed. Do you know where she is?”

“She is in the
foyer de la danse
,” she replied.

Raoul picked up his pace. The dancers’ lounge was the place where the performers met their admirers after performances, and at other convenient times. He did not wish to imagine Christine—for he could not think of her as Miss Daaé, having known her as a young girl—meeting any other admirers but himself.

By the time he found his way to the lounge, after making two misturns, he had worked himself into a bit of a state. Why did his pulse race so when he thought of her? Why did the thought of another man even looking at her make his fingers tighten?

When he opened the door—flung it, really—he found a scene much worse than he’d feared.

There was Christine, seated on a lush pink velvet sofa, in a room that looked too much like the boudoir of a courtesan for his comfort. Everything was plush and stuffed and velvet: chairs, sofas, large cushions on the floor, even three large square fabric cubes topped with glass that acted as tables. The colors burned sensually: rosy pink, crimson, royal purple, and saffron.

Wine bottles, platters of cakes and
fromages
and bread, bowls of glistening grapes and bright oranges and dusky brown pears, empty glasses, filled glasses—all of these trappings of entertainment littered the tables and hung in the hands of the men…the nearly dozen men…who fawned over his Christine. There were other dancers in the room, and two girls that he recognized, vaguely, as singers, but they did not hold the attention of their guests as did Christine.

She looked up when he came in, and it was not merely vanity that caused him to see the pleasure and true delight in her face. She smiled. Her fair cheeks became rosy and her blue eyes sparkled.

Raoul was not a Chagny for nothing, and never had he worn the mantle so well. “Good afternoon, Miss Daaé. I apologize for my tardiness in coming to call for you, as I’d promised last evening. Shall we go?”

He walked over to her, making his way through her admirers, and extended his arm to her. Their eyes met, and he couldn’t help but catch his breath at her glorious beauty. She looked so innocent, so young, so pure.

And he had loved her for so long.

Christine rose, and his heart swelled, for until she did, he was not altogether certain she would support his presumption.

“For me?” she asked, smiling, looking at the massive bunch of hothouse roses he still held.

He’d forgotten them; but even in the midst of that little embarrassment, he did not mind. For she was coming with him. “Of course, mademoiselle. Pure white roses, tipped with the blush of pink…only for you.”

If Christine’s other admirers were affronted at his sudden whisking away of the object of their affection, Raoul did not notice. He had a goddess on his arm, and he knew nothing else.

Even though it was a winter’s day, he wanted to take her outside…away from the dark busyness of the theater, away from the clamor of her other admirers. He settled her comfortably in his carriage, tucking fox- and rabbit-fur blankets about her legs and then wrapping the softest of ermines around her shoulders.

A fresh snow sparkled and would have blinded him if he’d not had his top-hat brim down low over his eyes. “Where shall we go?” he asked, turning to smile at her.

“Wherever you wish.”

He glanced at her as the carriage started off, the horse’s hooves clip-clopping smartly as they turned along the busy rue de la Paix. Her ivory cheeks had blossomed pink in the chill air, and even the tip of her perfect nose had reddened. He thought she looked delectable.

But while he was watching her, she was watching everything else. It occurred to him that she probably did not often have the luxury of taking a carriage ride through the streets of Paris. If she left the Opera House, it was likely rare, and on foot.

Raoul turned his attention to the
rue
and looked at it as she must see it, with its occasional closed carriages and caped men in
tall hats driving them. Women and men walked along the brick streets too, both garbed in subdued, but fashionable, clothing for the messy winter months, holding umbrellas as they did in nearly every season—to protect them from sun, rain, or snow.

Raoul noticed the street vendors calling out to sell
fromages
and fruits and bread, dressed in clothing not much better than what Christine herself wore, and dodging a trio of scruffy dogs that bothered them underfoot.

When they turned along the Left Bank, the icy Seine lay unbroken in a long stretch of white. They were flanked on the other side by a rough wall that separated the street from the road, and the river. And then he saw the spidery, wrought-iron atrocity that was just beginning to take form on the riverfront ahead of them.

Christine must have heard his snort of disgust, for she turned her attention away from the sights to look at him. “You do not like this new tower that is being built?”

“Indeed not,” he replied. “Monsieur Eiffel will destroy the Parisian silhouette, with this tall, gangly monstrosity. I have seen drawings of what it will look like when it is finished, and I cannot believe the mayor has allowed such an affront to take place in our beautiful city.”

Christine gave him an innocent smile that eased some of his annoyance. “But it is for the celebration of the centenary of your Great Revolution. And there is no intention that they shall leave it standing after, is there?”

“I certainly hope not, but we will have to look at it for at least two more years. And you might recall that it was not my revolution,” he chided gently. “My family were some of the ones who lost more than our land during the Reign of Terror. But being Swedish, perhaps you are not as well versed in our history. At any rate,” he said, determined to steer the conversation away from such unpleasantness
and toward something more personal, “I hope you aren’t angry with me for taking you away from your admirers.”

“No, of course not, Raoul. I am pleased that you would care to be seen with me in public.”

“Of course I do, Christine. I told you that I intend to court you.”

She looked away. “I know that’s what you said, but…well, that was last evening.”

“You think that I might have changed my mind overnight? When all I could think of last night was you?”

“I was not suggesting that
you
would have changed your mind, but that perhaps you might have had some assistance.”

“You speak of my brother, the one who himself had a widely known attachment to none other than La Sorelli.” Raoul laughed, but it felt hollow. He hadn’t spoken to Philippe yet, and although he had every intention of courting—and, if the truth be known, marrying—Christine Daaé, he acknowledged that it would likely take some convincing of his brother.

But he would do it. Philippe never denied him anything he truly wished; for he was twelve years older, and had always thought of Raoul as more of a son than a brother, since their mother had died when Raoul was born, and their father less than a decade later.

It was true, however, that Raoul did not like to think of angering or disappointing Philippe. That was why he’d gone to sea: to make something of himself that the
comte
would be proud of.