Devil at Midnight (28 page)

Running her fingers over it just increased the ache.

“Harder,” Christian ordered. He panted, his body writhing around hers. “You need to rub yourself harder. I can feel what your hands are doing.”

“I can feel what yours are,” she gasped.

He arched his head back on the post and groaned, his boots digging into the earth to brace. “Can you feel how much I long to be inside you? How much I wish I were swiving you?”

Knowing every pleasure was shared with him, she worked her fingers faster. He jerked when she curled one inside her sheath.

“Grace
.
”

It was a cry that demanded her to respond. “Your balls are heavy, Christian, but they feel like they’ve tightened, too.”

“They are full,” he confirmed, sounding strangled. “Because I have not enjoyed release in so long. Zounds, Grace, I could come a river for you.”

When she palmed her breast, a spike of excitement surged through his cock. His body twisted like an eel. Every movement intensified what she was feeling, as if his molecules were rubbing hers.

“Pinch your nipple, Grace. Pray you, do that for me.”

She did it and he grunted with approval, pumping himself faster. He was tugging his cock out hard from his abdomen, wrenching it with a force that astonished her. It felt good to him, and to her. His sensations folded over her own—his hot, rigid shaft, her aching clitoris, the wetness that ran so freely from both of them. When pressure tightened in her groin, she wasn’t sure whose it was.

“Hurry,” he whispered. “Love, I cannot ... hold on.”

She came when he cupped his second hand hard against his balls, as if that grip squeezed her, too. Fluid seemed to spurt from her, all thought blanking out in a blaze of bright white delight. This was stronger than any release she had known before, the pleasure stabbing and sharp. As strong as it was, she—or maybe he—knew it wasn’t enough. To have experienced each other’s touch and then have it snatched away was torture. The longing forged a tighter bond between them, maybe in compensation for what they’d been denied. Her own name echoed inside her head.

Grace,
he thought.
I love you.

The words were sunshine on the long winter of her soul. How much she’d needed to hear them embarrassed her. Fearing he’d sense her weakness through their mental connection, she pulled slowly free of him.

Christian wasn’t trembling like she was. Christian was flushed and relaxed and absolutely gorgeous from his orgasm. She could see he must have needed it. His ejaculation had formed a large dark spot on the earth beneath him, and the weather-silvered arbor pole seemed to be holding most of his weight. Despite his obvious languor, what shone from his eyes wasn’t satisfaction.

“I want to hold you,” he said, his warrior’s chest going in and out as he caught his breath. “Just once, I want to hold you in my arms until all our lusts are spent.”

M
istress Wei asked us to remain with her while she conducts business in Florence.”

Having calmly dropped this cannonball, Christian’s father stopped walking. His expression unrevealing, he squinted across the stone-flagged expanse of the Piazza Maggiore. The day was bright, and most of Bologna’s residents were home enjoying their afternoon siesta. The nearest witness was a skinny dog dozing in the sun. Gregori and Christian had all the privacy they could require, which probably explained why Christian had been invited on this father-son perambulation along the city’s shadowy arcades.

The tidings Gregori had waited for this moment to deliver were not welcome. Christian had been clinging to the idea that this situation with the minstrel had a foreseeable endpoint.

“I thought Mistress Wei only wanted an escort
to
Florence. I thought she could not predict how long she would stay there.”

His father grunted, meaty palms pressed into the small of his back so that he could stretch. Christian suspected the popping sounds his spine made betrayed his age more than he liked. He grimaced, straightened, then shot a cool and somehow mocking look at Christian.

“Mistress Wei is a woman. Women change their minds. And perhaps she has grown fond of certain members of our company.”

Christian knew there was no safe response to that. His father had made it clear he disapproved of Christian resisting their employer’s overtures. Not that Gregori would have approved of him giving in. Sometimes there was no winning with his father. Judging silence was the only viable approach, Christian clasped his hands behind himself. If he could have erased all thoughts from his head, thus precluding them from showing, he would have done that as well.

“I am of a mind to accept her,” Gregori announced to the crystalline blue sky. “The money she will pay would make a nice addition to our coffers.” Again, he shot that cool, laughing look at Christian. “No comment, son? No maidenly protests that you cannot bear her attentions a moment more?”

“You have observed for yourself the effect she has on the mean.”

“We are not here for the comfort of the men.”

Christian knew this was true. He also knew he could not risk his friends in the manner Gregori was proposing. Despite the coolness of the shadows beneath the square’s arcade, sweat was gathering at his hairline. Christian did not wish to draw this line in the sand, but he knew his father would keep pushing until he did.

“We will not stay,” he said quietly. “Once Mistress Wei is safely in Florence, we will go home.”

“
We
,” his father repeated, too proud to make it a question.

“My men and I.”

“
Your
men.”

Christian turned to his father. He was conscious of the inch or so he had on Gregori, though this did not make him feel more secure. His father resented being looked down on. “You know which men are mine as well as I do.”

His father narrowed his dark eyes, the hardness of his soul starkly evident. No joviality hid his nature in that moment, no courtly manners or sham learning. Christian clenched his fists behind his back, willing himself not to quail.

“You would break with me,” his father said, “over a woman whose feet you ought to kiss for wanting to bed you.”

Christian said nothing. There was no argument, no explanation he could have offered that would have improved his position. Gregori might even be aware that Nim Wei was dangerous. What he would never believe was that she was a danger
he
needed to be careful of.

After what felt like forever, Gregori shifted his gaze back to the sunny piazza. The huge facade of San Petronio cast knife-blade shadows across the way, its brick the same terra-cotta red as Bologna’s signature rooftops. The sheer size of the basilica, the way it dominated its neighbors, made it seem like an echo of his father’s will bearing down on him.

“We will see,” said his father. “We will see what you decide when it comes to the choosing point.”

Christian knew what he would decide, knew what he
had
to. Whether strategy or fear kept that knowledge locked inside him, he did not want to contemplate.

G
race had been trailing Christian through the Italian city at a discreet distance. When she was alive, she wouldn’t have wanted people seeing her interactions with her father, and she had just been a girl. Though Christian wasn’t that much older, his responsibilities were a man’s. If he felt afraid or intimidated, Grace knew it was better that she not see. Her sympathy wouldn’t in any way be what he wanted, nor her assurances that she thought he was a hundred times the man Gregori was.

When he walked away from his father to veer toward her, she pretended to be staring up the hulking front of the piazza’s church. She didn’t find the building particularly attractive, though its size impressed. She’d seen football stadiums that were smaller.

Christian stopped beside her, not turning his head but causing her arm to tingle where his touched it. His deep, deliberate breathing told her how carefully he was composing himself.

“San Petronio,” he said, nodding at the church. “He was a bishop in the fifth century.”

As interesting as it was to think of history having history, Grace really couldn’t get excited about this.

“What did your father say?” she asked.

Christian squeezed the fingers of his hands together, as close to wringing them as a man could get.

“Nim Wei wants us to stay with her in Florence. My father claims he will accept.” Christian swallowed, the sheen of sweat on his face more than the autumn sun could be blamed for. “I told him if he did, I would take my men and go home.”

Grace touched his sleeve. His hand came up to cover hers as well as it could. The sparks his palm was shooting into her ghostly fingers felt nervous. When he turned his eyes to hers, they were hollow.

“Grace, it was as if my father wanted me to defy him, as if he wanted the excuse to do something terrible.”

“The minstrel won’t let him,” Grace said, hoping this was true. “Her interest in you might be uncomfortable, but she won’t want to see you hurt.”

Christian shook his head at his feet. “My father can be ... persuasive, and Christ only knows what she really wants.”

“You told your father what you had to,” Grace assured him.

“I told him what he pushed me to,” he corrected. “And I fear I might have made things worse.”

 

 

W
hen Gregori Durand requested a private meeting, away from his men-at-arms, Nim Wei was not about to let him choose the venue. That would have been tantamount to accepting a fox’s invitation into its den. Nim Wei might be a lioness by comparison, but foxes had their wiles. Simply on principle, she set the time and place.

Consequently, she awaited Gregori at the home of one of her few human friends. Vincenzo was abed, as befitted his advanced age, but he had put his study and his servants at her disposal.

The room was small but handsomely appointed, with slanted shelves that extended along the intricately painted right and leftward walls. Illuminated manuscripts bound in leather rested on these supports. The texts ranged from Greek to Latin to Hebrew, and Nim Wei had procured many of them—from the ground where they had been buried in some cases. She did not share Vincenzo’s passion for their contents. Long experience had taught her modern problems could not be solved by antique outlooks. The most successful members of any species changed with the times. Nim Wei had, however, enjoyed the quest to recover these ancient volumes, just as she enjoyed her numerous meetings with her old friend.

Her only regret was that Vincenzo had never wanted her to change him, even when he grew too old to enjoy more energetic sports than poring over musty tomes. According to him, no sensible person wanted to live forever.

Considering how he had looked tonight, he was going to prove that soon.

Nim Wei touched the hourglass on the shelf nearest to his hearth. How quickly the sands of mortal life ran out, and how lusty and handsome her friend had been when he was just a student at Bologna’s famous university. He had called her the cleverest woman in Christendom—and the most beautiful. Many were the nights she had exhausted him with lovemaking, only to spend the hours till dawn sleepily arguing philosophy. She had loved Vincenzo’s enthusiasms, foolish though most of them seemed to her. Sometimes she thought she needed that from humans as much as blood. Without their excitement to spark her own, would she find immortality a burden?

She blinked a wash of pink from her vision and shook herself. These were dreary thoughts for a queen to have, no doubt the result of seeing her once-young friend after a long absence. Nim Wei was a phoenix. Her joy in life always rose again. She would not be here tonight if she were not still engaged by the adventure.

When a soft rap sounded on the study door, Nim Wei was perfectly composed.

“Enter,” she called, and the servant brought Gregori in.