forced herself to freeze, to go perfectly still and not panic and run again.
“Do you have an urgent appointment somewhere, Celia?” he asked quietly. “You certainly seem in a great hurry.”
Celia tried carefully to move away from him, slide out of his hold on her arms, but it seemed she was not unobtrusive enough. His other arm came around her, a steel bar at her back.
She eased her hands down his chest, and that hold tightened and kept her where she was. Her head was tucked under his chin, and she could feel the strong, steady beat of his heart under her palm.
Her own heart was racing. She couldn’t breathe too deeply because his scent was all around her. She closed her eyes and sought out the icy centre that had held her together all these years. The distance that had saved her. It was not there now. He had torn it away.
“I am tired,” she said. “I merely sought to retire. There was no need to chase me down like this.”
John gave a low, rough chuckle. “Usually when a woman runs like that she wants to be chased.”
“Like a doomed deer on the Queen’s hunt?” Celia choked out. She had been on such hunts, had seen Queen Elizabeth cut the fallen deer’s heart out. Celia had thought she herself had no heart left to be ripped out. It seemed she was wrong. There was still one small, hidden part of it, bleeding, and he was dangerously close to touching it again.
John had surely chased scores of eager women since they had last met, and held them thus. Kissed them in the darkness until they happily bled for him too.
“I am not most women,” she said, and tried once more to wrench out of his arms.
He only held her closer, until she felt her feet actually leave the floor. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her backwards until she felt the cold stone wall at her back, chilly through her brocade bodice.
Her eyes flew open to find he had carried her into a small window embrasure, where they were surrounded by darkness and silence.
“Nay,” he said. “You, Celia Sutton, are quite unlike any other woman in all England.” His voice held the strangest, most unreadable tone—bemused, angry.
“And you know all of them, I am sure,” she muttered.
John laughed and eased her back another step. He braced his palms to the wall on either side of her head, holding her trapped by his body as he had earlier. “Your faith in my stamina is quite heartening, my fairy queen. But I have only had twenty-eight years on this earth. Alas, not long enough to find all the women out there.”
Hearing his old name for her—fairy queen—once whispered in her ear as they embraced in a forest grove, snapped something inside Celia. He had no right to call her that. Not any longer.
Before she could think, her hand shot out and her fingers curled hard around his manhood.
He froze, and she heard the hiss of his indrawn breath. His eyes narrowed as he stared down at her, and the very air around them seemed to crackle with a new tension. This strange game, whatever it was, was shifting and changing.
The codpiece of his breeches was not a fashionably elaborate one, and she could feel the outline of him through the fine velvet. He was already semi-erect, and as her fingers tightened he stirred and lengthened. Oh, yes, she did remember this—how he liked to be touched. Caressed. She felt her hard-won sense of control steal back over her.
She twisted her wrist to cradle the underside of his penis on her palm and slowly, slowly traced her way up. She remembered how it felt naked, hot satin over steel, the vein just there throbbing with his life force. She reached its base, and with another twist of her fingers she held his testicles.
“Is this what happens when you catch your prey, John?” she whispered. She stroked a soft caress, lightly scraping the edge of her thumbnail over him.
She could feel the burn of his eyes on her as he held himself rigid around her. For once she had caught him unbalanced. He didn’t know which way she would jump. And neither did she. Not any longer. He did that to her.
She had acted on instinct, reaching out to bring her control back. But it seemed to be slipping even further away.
“Usually they get down on their knees to me and take me in their mouths about now,” John said crudely.
One hand left the wall by her head and she felt his finger press lightly to her lower lip. He traced the soft skin there. The merest whisper of a touch.
Celia gasped, and he used that small movement to slide his finger into her mouth, over her tongue. She jerked her head back, but she could still taste him—salt and wine. She wished she could pull away from him and snatch her dagger from its sheath on her thigh, plunge it into his heart so he could not touch her heart again.
“That will never happen,” she said.
“Nay? I think it will in my dreams tonight,” John answered. “But perhaps you want me on my knees to you instead?”
Before she knew what he was doing, he’d deftly twisted out of her grasp and arched his body back from hers. The hand that had been at her mouth slid all the way down to her skirts and drew up the heavy fabric until her legs were bare. The white stockings glowed in the darkness.
As Celia watched in frozen shock he fell to his knees before her and let those skirts fall back over him. She tried to kick him away, but his strong hands closed over the soft, bare skin of her thighs above those stockings. He caressed her there, on the tender inner curve of her leg, and pressed her legs further apart.
Then she felt his hot breath soft on the vulnerable curve of her, light as a sigh, just before his tongue plunged inside.
God’s blood. Her eyes slammed shut and her palms pressed hard to the wall at the trembling, burning rush of sensation that shot through her body. Oh, dear heaven, but she had forgotten how it felt when he did that!
Just as she had remembered how he liked to be touched, he remembered how she liked to be kissed there. He licked up—one languorous stroke, then another—before flicking at that tiny, hidden spot with the tip of his tongue. She felt herself contract at the pleasure, felt a rush of moisture trickle onto her inner thigh, and he groaned.
How she wanted him. How she had missed him, missed this, the feeling of being so wondrously, vitally alive. It had been so long. She had been dead inside for so long …
For just an instant she let herself feel it, let him pleasure her. This was John. The only man who had ever touched her heart. But then his hand closed hard on her thigh, just above the dagger, stroking her there so tenderly. So deceptively—just like before.
Before he’d destroyed her.
With a ragged sob she jerked herself away from him. She pulled her skirts from above his head and sent him toppling to the floor. But she also lost her own balance, and fell heavily on her hip against the wall. She leaned onto the cold stone for support and tried not to cry. Not to feel.
But his heat was still around her, and the musky scent of their arousal, the heated swirl of her feelings for him. She had to escape from it all.
John found his
