wanting her pleasure to match his and their coupling to resemble something far from the quick and lurid encounter that Beraud probably had in mind. As he closed his eyes against the cosmetic accoutrements of her trade and the falseness of the wig, it was easy to imagine other things—things that were true and right and good, the world that had been his once, before his sins had changed it.
Shaking his head, he came back into the moment, years of living in Paris concentrated in his hands, fondling with pressure and rhythm, asking for response, his breath blowing cold across heat, tightening her womanhood and raising her hips.
Something was happening to her, some dreadful, exquisite, carnal thing. No longer could she lie there wooden and tense when every fibre in her body ached with a feeling of thick want.
Wrong. It was all wrong, but a stronger force now propelled her.
Farther. She wanted him to move in her farther and she could not stop the groan that left her lips or the throb-beat of her skin around the gentle warmth of his fingers. A maestro. Playing her. Taking the rigidity of fear and replacing it with a loose and easy longing. Everything. Nothing held back. Hard against soft. Surrender.
‘Shh.’ He tried to hold her still, but she would not be calmed, his fingers lending panic to the edge of her need.
Don’t stop.
Don’t leave.
Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the feeling that had scattered all other thoughts aside, reaching for the craving that bore her down hard against the mattress even as his clever hands squeezed the very life from honour.
He felt her come, felt the muscles close against him rigid, thick in ecstasy, her sigh all that remained of breath. Spent and replete!
His whore now. God, Beraud had the measure of him after all, Cristo thought, as he unlaced his breeches and readied himself to mount her. Her wetness beckoned, the solace of women inciting a particular appetite in him that could no longer be denied. Straddling her open thighs, he positioned himself above, parting the soft lips of her core and fitting them around his heavy thickness.
The warmth of her crept into his soul as he thrust in hard to be confronted by the one barrier he had never expected to feel there.
Virgin?
The thought was as fleeting as the breakage and the giving and his full, tight engorgement. He could not have stopped himself even had he wanted to and the seed that he seldom left in any woman spilled warm against her womb, the last whimpering of his cock a question of flesh against better judgement.
A virgin whore. A trick. His mind sharpened as he lifted himself off her, the liquid of sex on her skin.
She had turned away from him now, eyes closed against seeing, languid abandon reforming itself into a tight kind of anger that he recognised. The corruption of innocence made him swear.
Who the hell was she? Who the hell had done this? To him? To her? The look in her eyes, as he had demanded a name and the incoherent reply—asking for help?
Lord above. He had been in the game of intelligence for years now and he had missed that? Real regret surfaced and guilt that held consent sacred in any relationship. He had never been a man to use force with a woman and virginity was something to be protected and given with full knowledge. He swore again, hating Beraud anew for sending him a brandy-filled whore-virgin completely new to the game.
More questions surfaced as her medallion suddenly glinted against the pillow, the long gold necklace no longer hidden by her blonde curls. Removing it from her throat, he took it into the light and knew that the past had found him.
Tricked. Duped. Another link in the chain that bound him here, lost to the pathways of proper society and for ever shamed.
Eleanor felt a rush of imbalance engulf her. Her palms fanned wider against the whiteness beneath and she struggled to find reality.
Naked. She was naked, though such a consideration was nothing against the sudden and dreadful knowledge of what had happened. Keeping her eyes shut tightly, she wished she were dead.
‘I know you to be awake.’ In French.
She turned her head, even as she knew she meant not to.
‘Why do you wear this? ‘
He sat in a chair with his long legs stretched out in front of him and her grandfather’s medallion dangling from his fingers, the lines drawn in gold catching the candlelight and sending rainbows spinning across the ceiling. His breeches were loose and his shirt was unbuttoned at the front, the breadth and definition of his chest so remarkably foreign that she could not look away.
Parts of the last hour were coming back. A great rush of redness covered her cheeks, though when his eyes passed across the juncture at her thighs she understood that what motivated him now was only anger.
‘Who the hell are you?’
When he reached out to press the heel of his hand hard against her stomach she was mortified by the tight need that echoed from the gesture.
A whore. He had made her such! The play of his fingers against her skin made her stretch towards him, every sinew wanting …
His palm broke contact.
‘For a woman without experience you are surprisingly wanton.’
Eleanor turned her head. Below the shouts of people became louder, glass falling against a harder surface and shattering from the clumsiness of inebriation.
A brothel.
She was in a brothel on the bed of a man whose very den of iniquity it was. Deflowered.
She smiled at such a term and then felt a single tear trace its way down her cheek to be soaked up by the burgundy velvet in the pillow behind. His string of French curses told her that he had seen it too.
Lady Eleanor Bracewell-Lowen? England and the rarefied world of the ton seemed a long, long way from here.
Chapter Two
Cristo held the medallion in his fingers and hated the fear in her face.
‘Who are you?’ he repeated, his voice not quite steady. He wished he might have left her there, just walked out into the night and waited until she had gone, but life was no longer that simple for him. Beraud had brought her to him and if the woman should know anything of his past, what then? For years he had held the secrets safe. He shook his head, hard. With her maidenhead lost he felt he owed her at least something.
One moment ran into two and then five more. But still she did not speak and the heat of fury leaked out of his vengeance.
Sitting back, he weighed up the options.
She would not talk and he no longer felt the desire to make her. She was shivering, too, for the fire had long since died out, as the cold of an early Parisian November crept into the space of his chamber, raising the fine hairs on her arms.
He
