in a world with no one else near, she became braver and leant over to trace her tongue around the shape of his ear exactly as he had done to hers.
His breath simply stopped and the scent between them was pungent and insistent, another binding that held them, another sense fuelled by wonderment.
Cristo let her take him this time, his control slipping into an unfamiliar acquiescence. He liked the way she held him tentatively, with the palm of one hand splayed against his chest and the hard length of his manhood pressing deep into her stomach.
When the other fingers curled around his shaft he tensed and she pulled away, until his fingers again found hers and returned them, the pure uncertainty leaving him breathless.
He wanted to move, wanted to topple her beneath him, but she held him with her fingers, her breasts grazing his chest and the length of her false hair tying him to immobility.
‘God, help me.’ His voice sounded nothing like it usually did and this time he spoke in English, a sure sign of just how far his restraint had slipped. Turning, his body covered hers, heavy and true, as he drove in hard because there was no moderation left in him, no restraint or inhibition. The shuddering finality of his release brought him a liberation he had long thought of as past.
‘God.’ His voice was not kind as he slipped from her a good twenty minutes later and crossed the room to the privacy of his bath chamber, the oath repeated again as he comprended the full enormity of what had just happened. Beraud’s purchased whore was making him care again, feel again, hope again.
Laying his forehead against the cool silver mirror, he closed his eyes. The girl was dangerous with her alabaster skin and her elemental sensuality. In his world, anything of value was a way of losing control, the weakness of concern an easy weapon for those who would want to harm him. And there were so many who did!
He needed to have her gone before others sensed an attachment and used her innocence as a pawn, needed to protect her in the only way that he still could.
Pulling on his breeches and finding another shirt, he walked back into the room, the anger marking his movements with haste.
Eleanor could barely understand all that had just happened.
Now he looked angry, unemotional, a different shirt buttoned full around his neck. No longer biddable. His hair was tied tightly into a queue and slid down the silk on his shoulders, an overlord of the dark underbelly of Paris, the four fingers still left on his right hand all bejewelled.
A stranger, only that, no vestige left of the lost hours shared between them. No remnant of a softer man who might truly cherish her. Just danger and hazard and difference, and a choice of life that showed in the hard lines of his body and face.
Eighteen and set apart from everything now, a fallen woman, a stupid woman, a woman who would never again quite fit in to the strictly governed world of her upbringing. Spoiled goods. What husband should want her?
Her breath came quick and shallow as she fought back the pooling tears!
She was going to cry now, he could see that in the way she tipped her head down and dropped her shoulders. A girl who had made a choice she regretted, her deep red lipstick smudged across her mouth like a wound.
‘Where are your clothes?’ He made no effort at all to moderate his voice.
‘Downstairs in a b-b-blue chamber, but my gown was badly torn.’ Fright had made her shake, the cover she was draped in shivering with some force. Excusing himself for a moment he unfastened the slats on the door and asked a servant to find her attire.
Then, moving to his wardrobe, he found a woollen jacket and a satin skirt that some woman had left here a few months back. ‘Put these on for now.’
She reached out for them and he added a scarf of fine wool from the many lined up at the back of his closet, noticing the feminine way she fashioned it around her neck. Her long wig was caught up in the heaviness of the layers and he saw darker locks below. All a ruse?
Interest sharpened. ‘How well do you know Beraud?’
‘He is one of my aunt’s clients.’
‘Then if you know what is good for you, ma chérie, you will stay away from him. His tastes run to the more eclectic …’ He tapered off, tired of trying to warn her, tired of taking responsibility for a whore who knew exactly what it was she was doing.
He could not save them all. He had learned that truth years ago when the first woman to plead for assistance had spent his gold on a bottle of the finest cognac and thrown herself off the bridge of the Pont d’Alma. Her body had been dragged up with his engraved watch in her hands and the weight of the law had descended, demanding answers that brought him notice he was far from wanting. Since then he had been much more careful.
He looked away as she stood and dressed, the slight reflection of her outline all that was left to him in the window. Even that he eschewed for the view outside, the first stirrings of the carriages and people in the vicinity of the Rue Pigalle.
Dislocated. One word rent from all that he so usually kept hidden, the sheer and utter waste of life and goodness and innocence slapped against a harder, more selfish world.
His world! Falder Castle glimmered like a golden promise on the edge of memory, the endless waves of Return Home Bay calling out in a hollow chant, ‘Come back, come back, come back.’
But he couldn’t, not ever, the consequences of sins binding him to the necessity of distance.
Shaking his head, he refused to think about the past and as he caught Jeanne’s measured glance he made himself relax.
A layer of tragedy coated her seducer’s night-dark eyes. Eleanor saw it even as he smiled and the core of her anger melted just a fraction. He was beautiful. She doubted she had ever seen a more beautiful man, even with his overlong hair and clothes that would not be out of place in a theatrical production in the West End of London. As she looked around, the room gave the impression of a faded glory, the strips of silk and velvet on his bed mirrored in the heavy curtains and ornate corded ties at the double-sashed windows. A piano of considerable proportion stood against the farthest wall, sheet music draped across the top. Books stacked in piles on the floor completed the tableau, the titles in an equal measure of both French and English.
With clothes on she felt braver, standing to run her fingers across the spines. Not lightweight reading, either. Moving then to the piano, she pressed down on a note of ivory, the sound echoing around the room in perfect pitch.
A well-used and well-maintained piano by Stein. She read the make in the words above the keyboard. The frothy, vivid orange skirt she wore swung out from her legs as she turned, surprising her with its easy movement—the sort of garment a dancer might use or a courtesan? With no undergarments the satin was cold against her bottom.
A short rap on the door took all her attention and with surprise she saw the man who entered was dressed exactly as her own grandfather’s butler might have been at the turn of the century.
‘Milord.’ His accent was pure Northern England!
