The Lover Page 8

  Blood thrummed underneath his hot, rough fingertips; his hip throbbed against hers, striking a rhythm deep inside her where he had ripped and torn and thrust and teased until pain had become pleasure so intense it had seared her soul.

  Her throat tightened, there where he had muffled his agonized groan of release. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He continued smoothing her cheek, forging a raspy link of shared recollections: his breath filling her lungs; her breath filling his lungs; their bodies merged into one, joined by sex. “You’re frightened.”

  Anne tensed, fighting his touch; fighting inexplicable tears. “Yes.”

  “Of me?”

  Yes.

  “I’m not …” She focused on the thick, black hair that curled at the base of his throat. Remembering its texture, crinkly and wiry. Remembering it abrading her breasts, an undulating blanket of prickly heat. “I’m not like that.”

  “But you are.”

  His fingers burned; his hip burned; the flesh between her thighs burned. It did not alter the truth. “No.”

  A thirty-six-year-old spinster whose only accomplishment was being a nursemaid did not scream and cry.

  “Shall I tell you what I found most attractive about you at the House of Gabriel?”

  Anne’s gaze flew up and locked with violet eyes.

  He would not lie to her, he had said.

  But she didn’t want to hear the truth.

  “It is not necessary.”

  Sunshine brightly illuminated the left side of his face; light filtered through the tips of his lashes. Faint lines radiated out from the corner of his eye. “But it is necessary.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “We both want,” he interrupted harshly. “That is why you made the assignation. And that is why I was there, waiting for you.”

  It was not she he had waited for.

  He did not know her.

  He had not even remembered her.

  Anne stiffened, both angered and hurt at his deception. “You said you would not lie to me, Monsieur des Anges. It is a simple matter of business that brought us together. You waited because of the promise of ten thousand pounds. It is my money that you found attractive. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  His fingers stilled.

  Shadow darkened the bedchamber, an ominous cloud on the horizon.

  And still his skin throbbed and pulsed.

  Against her cheek. Inside her breasts. Her womb.

  Every inch of her body remembered his touch, responded to it.

  “Nothing is ever simple,” Michel exhorted on a sharp inhalation of air. “Not lust. Not life. You’ve lost to death. You should know better.”

  Anne’s heart kicked against her ribs, galloped to outrun her fear.

  How could he possibly know? …

  The moisture in her mouth evaporated. “How do you know I’ve lost to death?”

  “You told me.”

  Frantically she cast about in her thoughts. Remembering, remembering—

  The wet lick of his tongue. Embracing heat; her breast boring into his chest; his masculinity nudging her femininity.

  You woke up … earlier … and said that you were late. That you had forgotten “their medicine.” Do you take care of someone … nurse someone?

  No. Not anymore.

  “I told you I would not lie to you, Anne Aimes.” The raised ridges edging Michel’s cheek whitened. “And I will not. Last night I waited for you in the hope that the woman who solicited my services would see my scars—and still want me.”

  And she had.

  A shimmering burst of sunshine underlined her unspoken affirmation.

  “You would not have been there, waiting, if not for the money,” she insisted, forcefully concentrating on the nature of their relationship instead of that enervating, throbbing pulse that promised more.

  More passion.

  More pleasure.

  The black of his pupils swallowed the violet band of his eyes. “If not for your offer,” he agreed, “I would not have been there. Waiting.”

  The truth should not hurt.

  “A man is more attracted to a woman’s beauty than he is by her passion,” she said defiantly.

  Now where had that come from?

  “No,” Michel said, fingers and voice equally grating. “Only a fool values beauty over passion.”

  “Yet you did not notice me eighteen years ago.”

  She bit her lip to stop the words—too late, her pain echoed among the gilded leaves.

  A rough, scarred thumb traced the heat racing across her cheek, gently brushed her compressed mouth. “Yet here you are.”

  Anne’s lips quivered. “I remember …” The woman he had danced with. Laughed with. “Are your duties not more easily performed when a woman is … beautiful?”

  “Every woman has her own unique beauty. Do you know how velvet is made?”

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell whose pulse palpitated and pounded.

  “It is … woven from different fabrics.”

  “There is a velvet woven from silk. Silk velvet.”

  “Yes.”

  It was very expensive.

  “In the night house I looked at you while you sat across from me, and I wanted you because you wanted me. But in the vestibule I touched your cheek.” His fingers rasped the length of her jaw. “And I thought …”

  Anne stiffened, waiting, breath suspended.

  “I thought I had never felt anything that soft … like velvet … until I touched your buttocks. Your skin there is like silk velvet.”

  She would not be disappointed.

  “A man does not judge a woman’s beauty by the softness of her … bottom.”

  Violet fire bled into the black of his pupils. “I assure you, a woman’s bottom holds great appeal to a man.”

  Anne’s muscles clenched.

  In memory.

  In desire.

  She moistened her lips; her tongue briefly scaled the coarse, salty texture of his thumb. “What can you give me as a lover that you have not already given me?”

  Darkness engulfed her. Michel leaned down, blocking the sunlight. “Intimacy,” he murmured, a whisper of breath that smelled of coffee.

  He licked her lightly.

  When she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, he licked her deeply, touching places inside her that had nothing whatsoever to do with her lips or her tongue. Scorching breath inflated her lungs. “Friendship.”

  Anne had never had a friend.

  A governess had schooled her, and shielded her from the village children lest they steal her away for her parents’ money.

  She squeezed her eyelids tightly shut; the taste of coffee lingered in her mouth. It was mellowed with passion.

  Hers … or his?

  “Friendship can’t be bought,” she protested.

  “Anything on this earth can be bought ….”

  Michel nipped her bottom lip, sucked it between his teeth to lave away the tiny pain before hungrily suckling it. As he had suckled her tongue. Her nipples. Her clitoris ….

  Her tongue, nipples, and clitoris throbbed in time to the pulsating veins inside her bottom lip

  She had no one waiting for her at her town house, only servants the solicitor had rented for her amorous adventure in London.

  What would it be like, she wondered, to live with a man, this man, if only for a month?

  What would it be like to leisurely explore the boundaries of passion and experience everything … every touch … every pleasure … that a man and a woman could know together?

  Things she’d never imagined. Sexual acts he hadn’t performed in five years.

  Breaking free of his mouth which was draining her very will, she desperately repeated the words he had claimed in the cab: “This is a sexual liaison.”

  Michel grasped her chin, preventing her from turning away to seek air that he did not give her. “I offer you more.”

  Intimacy. Sex. Fr
iendship. Lust.

  Anne swallowed. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

  A nightly rendezvous could be kept secret. But if she openly lived with him, servants would talk. Gossip would spread throughout London, and from there to Dover.

  She would lose all vestiges of respectability. As she had lost all vestiges of her virginity.

  “I do know what I’m asking of you.” Scorching words bathed her slippery wet lips. “I’m asking you to give me what I’m willing to give in return. Complete access to my body … in exchange for complete access to yours.”

  Complete access reverberated inside her mouth, against her tongue.

  “The women whom you invited to stay with you … did they accept this offer?”

  He rubbed his lips back and forth, moistening his mouth with the saliva he had imparted to hers. “I have never offered a patroness what I offer you now.”

  Anne felt as if she were drowning. In his heat. His scent. His breath. His taste.

  Day melted into night, morning into day, past and present pleasures merging.

  She clung to the reality of dialogue. “You have never experienced intimate sex … or friendship … with another woman?”

  Cold air replaced Michel’s lips and body.

  Anne stared up at him, chilled by his abrupt withdrawal. “I beg your pardon. I had no right to ask that.”

  “I told you. You may ask me whatever you wish.” The right corner of his mouth twisted, relaxed. “I have known such a relationship. Once. A long, long time ago.”

  A small barb of jealousy stung her. “What happened?”

  His voice was flat. Emotionless. “She died.”

  And he had loved her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Curiosity flared in his eyes, as if he were not used to a woman expressing her condolences. “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  She must have been an incredible woman to gain the love of a man like him.

  “It does not upset you, knowing that I have cared for another woman?”

  “No. Of course not. Why should it?”

  “Have you ever cared for another man?”

  Anne steadily met his gaze, heart pounding in her breast, her vagina, her eyes. She echoed his earlier words. “Once. A long, long time ago.”

  Fleeting regret darkened his face. “What happened to him?”

  “I do not know.”

  She had no idea whatsoever of what had happened to Michel des Anges these past eighteen years.

  Her solicitor had not told her that he was scarred. Nor had he told her that Michel owned property in both London and Yorkshire.

  He had not told her that the man who was once renowned for his ability to pleasure women had not had a procuress in five years.

  Before she could fathom Michel’s intentions, he tugged the covers down.

  Pure instinct took over. Anne lunged for the velvet quilt, the silk sheet—and lost both.

  She held rigidly still, refusing to give in to her embarrassment … or the indignity of trying to hide with her hands what was physically impossible to conceal.

  Her fingernails dug into her palms.

  He had no right to look at her in the unforgiving rays of sunlight.

  Thick black lashes shielding his eyes, Michel perused her nakedness.

  Unbidden, her gaze followed his.

  Her nipples were dark and swollen, her breasts startlingly white in comparison.

  They did not look like they belonged to an aging spinster. They looked like they belonged to a woman who had known a man’s passion.

  “A man takes pleasure in a woman’s breasts.” Reaching out, he plumped her soft flesh, his touch achingly gentle. As if she were fragile. Precious.

  A woman to be treasured rather than a client to be serviced.

  Her heart thumped against the heavy weight of his hand. She could see his scars—a mass of hard, puckered ridges—as well as feel them. The individual ridges were hard and hot. The nipple protruding from the cup of his fingers was equally hard and hot. Both his hand and her nipple rapidly rose and fell in cadence with her breathing—one flesh, a part of a whole.

  “He loves the softness.” Lightly he touched the pad of his thumb to her engorged nipple, pressed it into the mound of her breast. “The hardness.”

  Painful pleasure forked through Anne’s chest.

  Michel abruptly removed his thumb so that her nipple sprang up harder than before, longer, swollen to the point of bursting.

  Anne’s gaze shot up, away from the blatant sign of her arousal.

  His face was dark, intent, lashes long and thick against the smooth, unmarred skin underneath his eyes. Inky dark hair blocked the scars on his temple, caressed the ones on his cheek; blue highlights danced across the black hair framing the left side of his face.

  “You’ve watched mothers suckle their babies. And imagined a man suckling your breasts.” His voice was curiously remote. “The closeness it must create.”

  An invisible band squeezed her chest.

  He looked so utterly alone.

  A man who bore the grief of an eleven-year-old boy.

  A man who wanted to be whole. Desirable.

  “Men want that closeness, too. That’s why they suckle a woman.”

  Slowly Michel’s eyelashes rose, revealing a baffled hunger, as if he, too, were overwhelmed by emotions outside his control.

  “You’ve felt my heartbeat. Against your breast. Inside the palm of your hand.”

  Heat pulsated inside her palm where the night before his manhood had palpitated against her skin with a life of its own.

  “I feel your heartbeat now.” His gaze did not waver from hers. “This morning I felt it against my chest. My lips. My tongue. My finger, buried inside you.”

  Remembered sensation tore through her. Of shallow, penetrating probes. Of deeper, alternating thrusts.

  “I told you thoughts I’ve never told another woman.” Sunlight flickered in his left eye; his right one remained in shadow, dark and flat. “I confessed my need to touch. To be touched.”

  He lightly rotated his thumb round and round the tip of her nipple. “I admitted my desire to be wanted. Despite my scars. Needs and desires I will never share with another woman.”

  His words reverberated inside her body, primal and poignant, plucking and strumming an invisible wire that stretched tighter and tighter with each circle of his thumb.

  “I am a whore. By trade. You are a spinster. By marital status. If we were not what we are, we would not be here. But I want more. I want, for the time that we have left together, for us to simply be a man and a woman. Lovers. Living together. Sharing sex. Sleep. Laughter.”

  Anne could not breathe, either to expel the air that was locked inside her lungs, or to draw in needed oxygen.

  “I will not ask you again, Anne Aimes. Stay with me. Or we will both regret it for as long as we live.”

  Regret.

  Such an ugly word. An emotion she had vowed never again to experience.

  “I do not laugh … very often,” she managed.

  “Neither do I.”

  “I never wanted to be a spinster.”

  His relentless, circling thumb stopped. Violet pain flickered in his eyes. “I don’t want to be your whore.”

  “Have you really wanted a woman so badly that you touched yourself?” she asked unsteadily.

  “Oh, yes.” He gently flicked her nipple until it felt ready to burst—once, twice …. “Many times.”

  Erotic sensation that was neither pleasure nor pain arced back and forth between her womb and her nipple.

  Promising more … if she dared.

  “Have you ever touched … your breasts?”

  His violet irises ate up the bleakness of his pupils. “A man has the same needs that a woman does.”

  To touch. To be touched.

  To be wanted.

  Despite the past. Despite physical imperfections.

  Anne fixedly stared at his
scarred thumb, strumming her breast; at her turgid brown nipple, flicked back and forth.

  She imagined touching him as he was touching her.

  Tasting him.

  Kissing him.

  Suckling him.

  Feeling the pulse of his heartbeat against her lips. Her tongue.

  “As lovers … may I do anything to you … that I wish?”

  “Anything. Everything.”

  She labored for breath; the insistent thrumming inside her breast and womb was building to a crescendo. “Do the French really do … what you did this morning?”

  Suddenly his hand and his thumb were replaced by cold air. Heat brushed her pubic mound—his gaze. It was followed by the solid heat of his fingers.

  Anne instinctively gave him access. She opened up her legs to a rush of cooling air.

  His wrist curved, stiff linen cuff a shock of white against the pale brown vee of her pubic hair.

  A pulse leaped to life deep inside Anne where he had previously penetrated her. She flinched. Where he now penetrated her.

  Gently, insistently, he eased all the way in before slowly easing all the way out.

  His middle finger was slippery wet; a thread of crimson striated the creamy moisture of her essence.

  Suddenly she felt his gaze on her face, watching her study the evidence of the pain he had wrought the night before, and the desire he created anew.

  “The French are very practical when it comes to their pleasures.” His voice was low. Husky. “They are not as fastidious as the English.”

  Without warning the bed shifted underneath her. Between one heartbeat and the next Michel grasped her right leg; at the same time he twisted his torso so that he lay between her thighs, his face only inches away from her splayed femininity.

  Mortification vied with excitement.

  Anne involuntarily tried to close her legs.

  His fingers dug into the softness of her thighs. “Don’t.”

  “You can see me.”

  “I saw you last night.”

  “But this is not … night.”

  And sunlight was not kind to a thirty-six-year-old spinster.

  Michel pushed her thighs more widely apart. “There is no need for modesty between lovers.”

  No need for modesty. No room for dignity.

  She ached.

  With renewed passion.

  With lingering pain.

  “I need to … bathe.”