heartbeat. No rush of delight or a thrill of meeting glances. Only one man, even with his distant presence in a house as big as this one, had the ability to affect her.
Tucking back an errant curl, she took one last look in the mirror before she left the room to meet him.
The thin silk of her gown barely covered her and the outline of her nipples could be plainly seen. Beckoning. Cristo felt like simply stepping forwards and ripping the flimsy thing off, but he had travelled that path once before with Eleanor and knew enough to realise this time he needed to leave the power in her hands.
‘My lady.’ Hard to say with any sense of decorum to a woman dressed as she was.
‘My lord.’ Manners simmered above pure sensuality. Her lips were deep cherry red. ‘I have asked the servants to leave our supper out and dismissed them for the night. I hope you don’t mind helping yourself?’
‘Indeed, I do not.’ He felt his manhood rise another notch with the words so artlessly said, and moved to ease the tightness of his breeches.
The cravat at his neck was strangling, the starched collar rough against the skin at his throat. A hundred pounds of material seemed to hang upon his frame when all she wore was the lightest of gossamer silk.
Her feet were bare. He had seen that in the first second of meeting her, peeping out beneath the hem of her skirt. The scent of gardenias and violets was strong on her skin.
‘Florencia …?’
‘Is in her room in bed. My maid is watching over her.’
‘So it is just us?’
The beginning of a smile played around her lips and he looked around the room to gather his wits. A chaise longue in velvet was pushed against the far wall. On the table near the food flowers stood, the urns they were displayed in etched with woodland scenes.
Two heavy carpets lay on the floor, a pile of cushions heaped next to them. Almost accidentally. In the grate at the far end of the room a fire blazed.
‘Would you like some wine?’ She gestured to a bottle and glasses and he nodded, feeling like a man who had strayed into a pleasure dome, the woman before him a culmination of every young boy’s fantasy.
‘How much would you like?’
At her words he removed the glass from her fingers, placing it on a table behind her. Up this close he was taller than she remembered him and a lot bigger; the boy she had known in Paris replaced by the man.
‘I want as much as you would give me, Eleanor.’ His voice broke on her name and he gathered her close, warm breath against her cheeks and the glorious brown of his eyes locked into hers.
‘Ma chérie,’ he said as his lips came down and his hands threaded through her hair, the lover suddenly there again, gentle but firm. She could not have pulled away even had she wanted to.
But she didn’t want to.
Opening her mouth easily, he came inside, his tongue finding hers as he slanted his head. Heat and breath and anger mixed with want and love and regret; a recipe matured by time and by memory.
She was eighteen again, and shameless, her need wild beneath cold clear silk and the sharp edge of discovery.
This time she had lured him to her. The power of it was exhilarating, yet still she pulled back and placed her hands upon his chest.
‘Not yet, monseigneur.’ Muscles bunched along the line of his jaw, but he let her go. A gentleman who would not coerce a lady. Smiling, she looked down and saw how very much he wanted her.
‘For I wish to undress you first.’
She was a hundred times more experienced than she had been when he had taken her last and more lethal than any courtesan he’d had the pleasure of since. The regret that it had not been him to teach her surfaced as he stood perfectly still, feeling her fingers at his neck unlacing the cravat, her skin playing havoc against his own. He seldom allowed anyone dominion over his body, but he made himself relax. Beneath his shirt were the scars endured at eighteen, scars he had never willingly shown anyone before, stigma drawn in the opaque ridges of flesh. When her hands began to peel back the linen he froze.
‘I generally like to keep it on.’
‘Because of the marks upon your back?’
He was irritated by the shame that surfaced, over a decade ago and still having the power to hurt. He was also surprised she had remembered at all.
‘You have a good memory.’ He tried to keep the tone as light as he could, airy, inconsequential and nonchalant.
‘As I have only ever lain with one man it is not a thing easily forgotten.’
‘One?’ He could not understand what she was telling him.
‘Martin was impotent.’
Now he did.
‘Lord.’ The blue in her eyes had darkened, bruised with truth. ‘Lord,’ he repeated again. ‘So it has only been me?’
‘It was why I was out on the town so much in Bath, for he suddenly seemed to want a closer relationship in other ways and I could not give it to him. By staying out late it meant he was always asleep in his room when I returned.’
The world he lived in reshaped into something unrecognisable. Just him. Just her. Throwing off his shirt, he turned so that she could see the marks.
‘After Nigel I took passage on a ship run by a captain who thought hurting others was fun. It was a full month before I escaped and for a long time after that …’ He stopped because he could not go on.
‘You trusted no one?’ Eleanor’s words were whispered, an understanding in them that made him want to weep.
‘If I could go back, I would have trusted you.’
She smiled. ‘And if I could go back, I would have knocked on the door of the Château Giraudon and taken up your offer of protection.’
‘Over five years …’ Three words steeped in remorse.
‘But not a day more.’
Her certainty was like a balm and he reached forwards to trace the shape of her cheek before venturing lower, the skin on her neck and the full abundance of breast barely covered in fabric.
Her head fell back and she closed her eyes and he watched her as he found one nipple and turned it between his fingers. Dark blue silk fell away as he cradled the flesh and leant down to suckle.
Relief flooded into the parts of her body that had laid so dormant, his lips and tongue weaving magic.
When she felt the silk tumble from her shoulders she just stood there, in the room with the firelight and candlelight and perfume, a woman who wanted all that would come next and be damned for any consequence. She held his head, the thick glossiness of his hair twisted in her fingers, so that pain lingered in pleasure in the same measure as it rested in his pull on her nipple.
Not
