Dane (32 page)

“I do. But I seriously believe I can defend myself against one elderly maidservant.” They turned another corner, moving past a fireplace so large she could have stood inside its hearth. And then past a wall of mirrors, then another of windows.

“You didn‟t hear her. You—“

“Shh. There‟s nothing we can do about her tonight. I need to have you now. To know you‟re here and real and mine. Tomorrow is time enough for serious matters.”

Moments later, they went through a door. She stopped inside the room he‟d shown her to, standing in the middle of a fine Persian carpet, and surveyed the massive olivewood bed hung with dark burgundy. She heard the door click shut behind her and turned to see him lean back against it. The halo around him gleamed pure silver but was strangely turbulent. Her eyes dropped to his, found them ruthless on her.

“What is it telling you?” He pushed off from the door and moved toward her. “My aura. You were studying it for clues to my mood. Does it inform you I‟m glad your serving woman revealed herself a lunatic so that you wound up here in my bedchamber tonight?”

“Dane.” Her lips firmed, the schoolmarm again.

Dane chuckled to himself, low and dark. “It‟s true.” He circled her slowly, prowling, drawing blunt fingertips over her, a light touch at her waist, hip, back. “But what else does it tell you, I wonder?”A pause. Then gently, “That I know your secret?”

Her green eyes went wary. “What secret?”

“That you are satyr. Like me.” The words were soft, accusing.

But she stepped back from them, as if hit by a physical blow.

“Don‟t be ridiculous.”

He ignored her denial, stalking her toward his bed. Lifting her and tossing her back upon it, and looming over her with hands planted on either side of her. “I scented you tonight before you had even arrived at my door. And it brought to mind your scent that first time we met in the grove last Moonful, something Dante had made sure I‟d forget. Since then, you‟ve been doing something to disguise it. What?”

She managed a brittle laugh. “Honestly! First Odette reveals her insanity, and now you.”

He dragged her higher on his bed, raining hot kisses on her throat, her mouth. Holding her with those big hands that always before had made her feel safe. Only she didn‟t feel safe now. She felt exposed, scraped raw by his discovery.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked. Her lips trembled and she folded them inward as if to hold in her confessions. “Eva.” His voice was a low growl.

“That you‟ll tell!” She pushed against his chest in emphasis. “That I‟ll be caged in some laboratory and studied like a bug on a pin. That Mimi and Lena will be put out on the streets when I‟m not here to protect them. I‟ve kept this secret for twenty-two years. And you wonder that I‟m afraid to reveal it?”

“I‟m not going to tell anyone.”

“What are you going to do?” she demanded in a ravaged voice.

“Do?” His mouth touched hers, butterfly soft. “I‟m going to undress you. Here on my big bed, and kiss you, and hold you, and come inside you. All.”A kiss. “Night.”Another kiss. “Long.” His hands came between them, unfastening her bodice, putting his plan into action.

“But shouldn‟t we.. don‟t you... care what I am?”

“Oh, I care,” he said, stringing more kisses along the pale flesh he was uncovering—her breasts, her ribs. “I care deeply. And I‟m about to s how you just how very, very deeply.”

Her terrible secret was out to him at last, but strangely Eva could only feel relief and a fierce need to have him do just as he suggested. To feel connected to him. She rolled from him and both came to their knees on the mattress. In a hurried rustle of wool, silk, and linen, they undressed themselves and each other in the dim golden light. They spoke in hushed, excited voices.

“Leave the stockings,” he said when her hands went to her garters.

She nodded, devouring him with her eyes. He was so handsome. Sculpted like a statue of some powerful Roman god come to life, its phallus angling tall and ardent from a dark nest.

Needing to touch him, she put her palms on his chest and kissed his throat, and felt the shudder that ran through him when their bodies pressed close. “What about Dante? Will he come?”she asked.

His hands had cupped her buttocks and now were squeezing and massaging them in a voluptuous fashion. “I imagine we‟ll all come,” he said, sounding distracted. She glanced over her shoulder and saw he was looking to their reflection in the window glass, watching his dark hands shape and reshape her twin ivory globes. “But I will be in control.”

Catching her eye with his roguishly wicked gaze, he bodily turned her to face their reflection as well, her silk-encased calves sliding between his on the mattress. Save for her stockings, they were naked there together on their knees, his chest and cock and thighs warming her backside.

His fingers traced over one of her garters and the expanse of silk it held high on her thigh, as if he enjoyed the fact that the clasp restrained the stocking and forced it to conform to her shape. She watched his hands play over her body then, exploring. Eventually, he cupped her breasts, rolling her flesh between the heels of his hands and the flats of his fingers with such relish that she sensed he‟d saved this for last. Sensation fluttered high between her legs and her inner tissues moistened, as if in anticipation of where all this must ultimately lead. A breath soughed from her and her head lolled back on his chest. Her hand lifted to curve at the side of his throat.

“Your hands always seem to wind up here,” she noted breathlessly.

Beneath lowered lashes, her eyes were riveted on the mesmerizing pinch and twist of the long, blunt fingers drawing out her nipples.

In his reflection, she saw his slow smile, the predatory glitter of his eyes. “Your breasts beg a man to touch. So firm, and high, and white.”

He drew her hands to hold their lush weight and showed her the motion he liked, and then watched her fondle herself in his stead with a look of intense satisfaction on his face. “Gods, that‟s so beautiful, Eva,” he said reverently. And with his eyes on her in such hot approval, she did feel beautiful.

Behind her, he shifted slightly, found his cock, and with his fingers, guided it between her legs. Pressing it lengthwise along her slippery folds, he sawed along them, making her tremble.

“I‟m wet,” she said softly, and heard the apology in her tone.

Their eyes met in the glass and the desire in his lightened her heart.

“I love that you go wet for me,” he said in a voice gone hot and dark.

The hand at her hip went lower over her abdomen until his second and fourth fingers pressed at her pubic bone, one on either side of her clit.

Gently, they forked upward, spreading her, exposing her sensitive nub to the cool air. She gasped, shocked at his daring.

“But how naughty you are, little Eva,” he murmured in feigned censure, his gaze riveted to their reflection. “So naughty, showing me your sweet pink clit.” Her eyes widened, uncertain.

In the glass, they looked so decadent together, him a burnished, broad-shouldered, masculine god towering protectively over her more feminine frame. Her hands still on her breasts. His hand splaying her private flesh in this almost obscene manner. Yet the very sight of them like this sent a tumultuous burst of excitement fizzing and sparking through her veins.

“How shall I punish you, I wonder?” he continued in a gentle scold.

“I don‟t know,” she whispered, tentatively entering the game. “I can‟t help such things.” She arched, tilting her hips back, the movement parting her slit so she flowered naturally for him, beckoning him inside.

He sighed as if he were a tutor sorely disappointed in his pupil.

“How shall we endeavor to check such hedonistic impulses?”At odds with his words, he nestled himself there at her quivering center; and then he was rising in her, his mushroom knob stretching her labia wide.

Something brushed her clit. The callused tip of his middle finger.

She moaned. His breath came, warm at her ear. “I‟m appalled, dear Eva. I begin to think you might have done this before.”The tantalizing touch came again at her clit.

“No, no, I haven‟t... monsieur.”

He made a soft, disbelieving sound. “You won‟t get out of your punishment so easily, mademoiselle. Not with lies.” His length pushed higher in her then without hurry, in a measured glide that made her writhe against him, wanting more. But a band of steel wrapped itself around her waist and held her firmly now, refusing to accommodate her impulse toward a headlong rush. Instead, he took his sweet time, restraining her with his body at her back, and his thighs crowding on either side of hers so closely that it was as if her knees had been bound together. Her slit and channel were compressed more tightly than she‟d ever been for a man‟s invasion. And still he pushed on with maddening slowness, opening her snug haven with sure, steady power.

“Gods, I can feel my cock fucking every inch of you,” he groaned.

His features were drawn and tense, his restraint obviously coming at a cost.

“I need you deeper,” she begged, knowing suddenly that this was to be her amatory punishment in his game—this withholding.

“No, not yet,” he whispered. And still, he didn‟t fill her completely, but only began to thrust in short, shallow pulses that stroked his bulbous knob in such a way and on such a particularly sensitive spot within her that her inner tissues began to shiver and sob for him. His fingers toyed with her clit in the softest of torturous, titillating strokes. She was a void now, nothing more, nothing less. An emptiness that wept to be filled and fulfilled. She felt confined, dominated, controlled. She wanted it to go on forever, yet at the same time she wanted to scream for relief.

She lifted her lashes and gazed at their reflection. Saw his dark head bent to her shoulder, his mouth on her throat. Saw the desire etched on her face, the raw tension in his. Saw his hands, big and strong on her pale flesh. “Deeper, please, Dane.”

“I‟m sorry, Eva.” He kissed her nape with gentle regret.

She wanted to wriggle lower on him, to widen her legs and move her body so as to force him to give her what she craved. Yet at the same time, she was thrilled by the fact that she could not. By the fact that he was in complete control. Only he would determine the strength and pace of their mating. Only he decided how she could move on him. Only he decided how deeply he would fill her.

Here was the sort of man she‟d dreamed of in her solitary bedroom.

A man who would take charge in these matters. A man who knew what to do with a woman. Who knew what she needed, and had the confidence and strength of character to give it to her. Or to withhold it for their mutual pleasure.

Something shifted in her heart then, some terrible, wonderful, wrenching emotion that she knew with a certainty would forever connect her to him from this moment on. In the glass, she saw her mouth move, watched her lips silently forming three powerful, binding words. I love you.

Though she made no sound and he couldn‟t have seen, something seemed to give way in him. His hands captured the bones of her hips and he took her with a single, mighty thrust. She cried out as she felt his thick phallus tunnel through her compressed channel like some slick erotic fist.

“Your so tight like this,” he rasped, his gaze sweeping over her reflection as if to possess all of her. “So fucking tight.”

“Yes.”

“So fucking mine.”

“Yes, I‟m yours. Yours, Dane,” she vowed.

With a masculine growl of satisfaction, he ebbed from her and then plunged again, mating her with a series of vigorous slams that shuddered her breasts. In this, he owned her, taking what he wanted of her, yet offering her rapture in the taking. A raw, curt groan tore from his throat as he drove so deep and high that she was lifted from the bed, and her body held aloft only by the thick, quivering cock in her cunt and his broad hands on her flesh. Held so tightly, she felt his balls lift tight at her bottom, felt the warm burst of seed that pulsed through his shaft. It shot from him and fountained inside her in a rapid series of hot, hard gushes.

She cried out, overwhelmed by sensation. But impaled so thoroughly, she could only ride him and thrill to his body‟s domination of her own.

His fingertip pressed at her thrumming clit and rubbed gently.

“Come for me,” his velvet voice urged. And with a soft gasp of feminine surprise, she did, melting over him, breaking on the crest of her own orgasm, her tissues fisting him and gulping greedily at the semen he pumped like some pagan volcanic god licking tongues of fire at her womb.

“Oh, thank Gods, thank Gods,” she whispered, glorying in his gift to her, in his allowing her to reach her pleasure and experience his.

“Eva.” Her name on his lips was a rough benediction, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. They clung there on their knees forever it seemed, caught in a carnal spell, arching under each clench, each spill; undulating together as one body, one moan.

Long, delicious moments later, their breathing slowed and they lay together on his big bed, her on her back and him alongside. Head propped on his fist, he gazed down at her. “You never said how it is that you disguise your scent.” As if unable to stop himself from touching her, his fingers wandered to play gently in her moist nest of curls. She sighed with pleasure and shifted her legs, luxuriating in the wonderful slip and slide of the semen he‟d deposited in the void between them.

“I drink a powder made from crushed olive pits,” she murmured.

“The only suitable olives in all of Rome grow somewhere here on your land.”